


You Walk The Path To Your Own Demise

by Leopardmask



Category: Hermitcraft RPF
Genre: Additional warnings in notes when needed, Gen, Grian stop picking up every interesting-looking cursed object, Respawn is funky but is a thing, Robot Tango, Vex Jevin, Vex Magic, demise - Freeform, lots of death and destruction of course, nothing too graphic I think, season 6
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-12-24
Packaged: 2021-03-09 00:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 17
Words: 26,157
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27026158
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leopardmask/pseuds/Leopardmask
Summary: Grian finds a book of scary stories in an abandoned library. Will it inspire a harmless game, or foretell of many more sinister fates...?
Comments: 146
Kudos: 121





	1. The Mysterious Book

_"You walk the path to your own demise."_

-

Grian was bored. Everyone was too busy to play a game or to mess with. He didn’t have any ideas he wanted to build. He just paced around the first floor of his towering base. But he had gotten tired of that as well, and eventually decided to do something more productive. So now he was flying aimlessly around some uninhabited areas, just seeing the sights.

Areas uninhabited by players, at least. A sudden boxy structure broke through the dense canopy in front of him. He'd stumbled across a woodland mansion. 

Grian’s landing smoothed into a trot on the flat roof. Should he really go inside? Mansions were often very dangerous for the unprepared player. He was just out on a casual flyaround.

He chopped a hole in the roof and dropped through.

Immediately, Grian noticed an abundance of torches placed haphazardly around the walls and floor. He breathed a sigh of equal parts relief and disappointment: this mansion had been raided long ago by his fellow hermits. Probably some time before the patrols and pillagers had started roaming across the land, since with their appearance not many people cared about the mansions anymore.

Oh well. He might as well have a look around. Maybe there was something valuable or interesting that the previous visitors had missed.

After some wandering, Grian found himself in the mansion’s library. He was a little surprised that most of the bookshelves were intact and still full, considering how useful scavenged books could be in enchanting setups. Figuring there was probably nothing better to do, he ran his hands idly along the spines, until one seemed to stop him. It stood out from the others, with a spine that was jet-black and had stripes across it that were white as bone, rather than the faded colors of the books around it. Curious, Grian pulled it off the shelf for a closer look, half-hoping that doing so would open a secret door somewhere.

“Bone white” turned out to be an apt description, as the cover of the book was decorated elaborately with a skeletal hand wrapped around the spine, with its fingers across the front cover and the thumb on the back. There was no indication of a title or description anywhere on the cover. Grian opened the book, his hand fitting perfectly over the skeleton one.

There was no title on the first few pages, either. Instead, it began directly with the text.

_"The stories within these pages may look like fiction; thrilling tales to shock and delight. Make no mistake: ahead lies a warning. Your future, dear reader, depends on whether you heed the words of the tales that unfold before you. And as you read, remember: there are no winners in the game of life - only those who are the most well-off when they lose."_

Fascinated, Grian started poring over the rest. It was a book of stories, mostly written like fables and cautionary tales. They had names like “The Unbreakable Cage”, “Poison Thorns”, and “The Deadly Gamble”. There were stories of fire and brimstone, dragons and zombies, hubris and betrayal, transformations that led to reward - or ruin. Each story seemed oddly familiar, although he knew he would remember if he'd read a book like this before. There were around twenty stories, he guessed, and they all had one thing in common: every story ended in death. On the very last page, a single phrase was handwritten in bolded lettering.

**_"You walk the path to your own demise."_ **

Thoroughly spooked, Grian shut the book. As he did, he felt a shiver run down his spine. And was that a burst of... laughter, in the distance?

He shook his head, chuckling at how easily the book had scared him. But regardless of how silly it was, something about it compelled him. He inspected the cover, the deep black that had never faded, the creeping skeleton hand. An idea started to form in the back of his mind, inspired by the book in his grasp. Smiling, Grian tucked it into his inventory and flew home.

\-----

By the time he reached his base again, Grian knew how he would amuse himself next. He dove for the nearest box and started poking through it for a blank book - there had to be a few SOMEwhere around here. The skeleton book was probably meant to scare little villagers (or illagers) into behaving and staying safe, but warnings about death meant nothing to players like Grian. Dying was just a temporary inconvenience. The line about life being a game, though, _that_ was interesting. Grian found some ink and a quill and started writing. A hook to catch people’s attention, a consequence that would make things fun, an incentive to the winner, and a way to keep people interested even when they could no longer win...

He grinned, shut the book he had written in, and stepped through his Nether portal, with building supplies and both books in his ender chest for safekeeping as he traveled to New Hermitville. Grian wanted to challenge the others, so he had put a rule against diamond armor in the instructions. As a test, he wore gold armor instead of his usual overenchanted diamond as he flew down the narrowing tunnel-

**Grian experienced kinetic energy**

Grian sighed. He was back in his base. On the plus side, he knew he’d made his idea a good challenge. On the other hand, now he had to make his way all the way back down the New Hermitville tunnel to get the items he had dropped. Compounding the issue, he was oddly disoriented upon waking. He shivered slightly as he got out of bed, although with his customary sweater on it usually wasn’t that cold in his base. The feeling passed quickly, so Grian dismissed it, focused on getting his stuff back and getting to the gaming district as quickly as he could.

\-----

Grian modeled the display board after the cover of the mysterious book: a wall of black concrete, a skeletal hand reaching over the front. On a lectern in front of it, he placed what he had written, and read over it one more time to make sure it was the way he wanted it.

_“NEW HERMIT EVENT - starts the day after the next full moon_

_This is a new game where the goal is simple: Don’t die._

_Pay 50 diamonds, add your name to the list, and then proceed to live as long as you can._

_There’s a catch, though. If you die - you lose. But you are not out of the game._

_Your new goal as part of the dead squad is simple. You must “help” the people who are still alive to ... not live anymore._

_However, there is NO direct engagement allowed - so you must think of other ways (traps) to help the alive folk. Everything else is up to you._

_Some final points:_

_-This game is dangerous and you may lose items. You must be OK with this._

_-God armour makes the game too difficult, so when you sign up please take some armour from the chests provided. You can enchant them in anyway you please._

_-Everyone starts on the alive team. The dead may team up if they want to. The alive may team up if they want to._

_-Go about your daily business as usual._

_-GOOD LUCK AND STAY ALIVE._

_-Grian"_

Everything seemed to be in order. Except for the blank front page - his game still needed a name. “The Game of Life” seemed too cheesy to him, and a cheeky switch to “The Game of Death” even more so. He took out the mystery book and paged through it, looking for ideas.

His gaze fell on the last page. A smile spread across his face. Perfect. With a flourish, on the first page of his instruction book, Grian spelled out a single word.

Demise.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> October 15 - the game of Demise has officially begun.


	2. The Unbreakable Cage

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: the death du jour involves drowning and head/neck injury, both mentioned in pretty vague detail. Drowning is in the paragraph starting "There was one spot where the current wasn’t pulling him down," and head injury in the next paragraph, "He came down on the wet glass".

_ "The caged dog had escaped! But something worse was waiting for him just outside." _

-

It all started with a dare.

Just an innocent game between friends.

The pillagers should have been the first clue that something wasn’t right. They usually only showed up in open country, in their outposts, or near villagers, and the dare field was none of those. They just stood a short distance away. Watching. Waiting?

He shouldn't have done it. He had just put so much time into making sure he was safe. But the allure of making back the diamonds he'd spent was too tempting. And there was this  _ energy _ in the air that seemed to draw him in, to tingle on his skin as Grian read out the first challenge in an official voice.

"Rendog, I dare you... to catch the totem."

Ren held on tightly to the scaffolding tower with one hand and his totem of undying with the other, as Grian pushed the tower higher and higher. His heart pounded with anticipation. The tower started swaying in the light breeze.

Finally, the tower stopped ascending. Ren scrambled onto the top with shaking hands.

"Can you hear me?" Grian's yell carried up from the ground.

"Just barely, dude," Ren called back. "What's next?"

"I'm going to count, you'll toss the totem off the edge, I'll count again, and you jump!"

"Alright, dude... I guess I'm ready when you are."

"One, two, throw! And, one, two, jump!"

Ren steeled himself and dove off the tower. He angled himself downward, arm outstretched, reaching for the totem that was already too far below to even see. Where was it? The ground rushed closer.  _ Where was it? _

There! Ren's fingers brushed the totem just as the rest of him hit the ground.

Ren blacked out for a split second. Then the totem exploded under his hand, showering him in green and healing the deadly injuries. He groaned and rolled over to face Grian, who looked just as surprised at Ren’s success as he was.

Ren grinned, adjusted his sunglasses back into place, and held out his still-healing hand. “So, uh, about those 50 diamonds...”

  
  
  


He had gotten lucky. The challenge had gone wrong and he’d still beaten it. He felt on top of the world. Every breath felt electric. He could almost taste the power. How about another challenge?

  
  
  


“Rendog, I dare you... to escape the aquarium.”

Ren took a few deep breaths, psyching himself up. Then he took one more, ran at the wall of water, and dove in.

There was one spot where the current wasn’t pulling him down, one spot where he could even reach the ice ceiling. Underwater, he could barely get the leverage to punch. At one point he tried bracing his feet against the wall, but they could barely find purchase. He couldn’t breathe.  _ He couldn’t breathe. _ Air escaped from his lungs, and water started to slide in. Finally,  _ finally, _ he punched through! He pulled himself up, coughing and gasping, onto the wall of the tank. “I did it! Yes!” Ren stood up and jumped in celebration.

He came down on the wet glass - and slipped. Ren’s feet went out from under him. His head hit the edge of the tank with a  _ crack.  _ He dimly registered hitting the floor below. Then, nothing.

Grian was laughing as Ren faded back into consciousness, finding himself in the bed that he had thankfully used at the edge of the field. Seeing him made Grian stop laughing quickly.

Ren grimaced - at the loss that this meant for him, and also at the weird-feeling respawn. “Ugh... my stomach hurts, dude.”

“That’s, uh...” Grian hesitated. “I don’t think that’s really your biggest concern right now...”

Ren struggled to sit up, confused at what Grian meant. Then he looked down at himself.

His head snapped up. He looked around frantically. Everything around him was as bright and colorful as ever. Grian’s sweater was still red. But Ren...

Ren had turned grey.

“Erm, yeah... this isn’t a good look, is it?” He got out of bed and twisted around to inspect what he looked like. Clothes, skin, hair, every part of him was grey. Although, strangely, he had a feeling that behind his sunglasses, his eyes were still their normal, piercing blue. “What the heck happened to me??”

“Wait,” Grian realized. "Did that happen because it was your Demise? I think it's because of the game! That's cool, that means everyone can keep track of who's 'dead' and who's not!"

"Another problem," it suddenly occurred to Ren. "I, uh... I might be legitimately dead. Or undead, I guess, since I'm still standing here talking to you."

"What? No way."

"I'm panicking right now, dude," Ren pointed out. He put his hand on his chest. "My heart should be racing right out of my chest right now, but there's nothing there!"

"That's... hmm." Grian wavered. "I guess you should probably talk to Xisuma about that. Or maybe Cleo could help?"

Telling Xisuma probably would be the smart move, Ren thought. But, oddly, he found that he didn't really want to. In fact, he would prefer that the admin didn't know about the Dead Team turning grey at all... at least until Xisuma was on their side too.

"Maybe," Ren mused. "My head's all confused right now though, I think for now I just need to walk it off, you know?"

"Yeah, I get it." As Ren turned to leave, Grian called, "No hard feelings though, right? I mean on the actual death part, not... whatever this is."

Ren smiled, his expression impossible to read behind his sunglasses. "Yeah... no hard feelings, brother."

\-----

Ren's walk turned into a wander, aimlessly crisscrossing the vaguely inhabited edges of the world for two days. He wasn't sure what he was looking for, but he didn't really feel like doing anything else, so he just kept walking.

At some point, he found himself in a swamp. The soft ground barely affected his footsteps. He found a Nether portal decorated to look like a skull, and a pumpkin patch leading down a path to an inviting-looking graveyard.

Ren ran his hands over the gravestones. Each one was unique. In his mind, he matched every hermit to their own gravestone, the perfect one just for them. He didn’t have one of his own; death had other plans for him. This could be his home for a while, though.

He had been told a story, once, about spirits known as church grims. The first body laid to rest in a graveyard would remain there in spirit, greeting and guiding the newly dead. Most people would rather not subject another person to that lonely fate, so instead they would bury a dog.

Ren was the first to die in this unexpectedly magical - or cursed - game. The first to learn about this strange, grey limbo that the Demised would find themselves in. The others wouldn’t know how to handle this fate. Ren could teach them. He could be the Demise Grim.

For the time being, he would call himself Grimdog.

As he accepted his role, the graveyard began to feel more like home, but it still didn't look like one. He found a crypt near the hermits' future graves. Fully intending to explore and renovate it, Ren stepped inside.

The deep shadows in the corners grew even darker. They drew toward Ren, wrapping protectively around him and settling into the shape of a hooded cloak. He watched with fascination, reveling in the new power and form.

A chill swept through the air. It would have been uncomfortably cold for any of the living. He stepped out to greet it.

His name was Grimdog. His job was to guard and fill the graveyard. It was lonely work, but soon, the first of his friends would arrive.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> October 31 - Ren's enthusiasm outweighed his caution, and he became the first victim of Demise.
> 
> (Technically the video was on November 1, but I don't want to post multiple chapters on the same day, and couldn't pass up the opportunity to post the first death/the story of Grimdog on Halloween.)


	3. The Ice Queen's Tower

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Pretty sure no tw's this chapter. Enjoy!

_ "No one could survive a fall from the tower - not even the queen herself." _

-

Stress had never been good at making diamonds. So she jumped at the opportunity to possibly win  _ nine hundred _ of them... and again at the chance to win more from a few risky dares.

The aquarium was easy. She used her magic to pull herself upward, toward the icy ceiling. At the same time, she shifted the cold water around her to shield against the currents. She barely had to hold her breath before she blasted her way out. To Grian’s stunned reaction, she simply replied, “When diamonds are on the line, I can do these things.”

The void was scary. Stress didn’t think of herself as much of a flyer. But this was easy, right? Down and up. She set an out-of-bounds alert on her communicator, opened her elytra, and jumped. She started by gliding down gradually, but the anticipation was just too much, so she dove. Stress felt the depths pulling on her, felt the thin air of the End leave her lungs, and knew she was too far down. Frantically, she pulled up and shot back toward the diving platform. Her first breath out of the void turned into a cry of triumph. As Grian cheered, Stress skidded and tumbled to a stop on the platform, gasping for breath but very much alive. 100 diamonds. She had made back double what she had originally put into the game of Demise.

The tube was even easier than the aquarium. Given a nice, long approach, Stress easily swooped through, barely even clipping her wingtips on the sides.

And then there was the totem. The last of the challenges. Whatever ghost of competence she had surprised herself with before, now left her. As soon as she dove for the totem, she found herself in a spin, completely disoriented with no idea where her saving grace had landed. She missed by a mile.

\-----

Rime crept up the sides of the crypt as its inhabitant climbed the ladder. She stepped out into the open - and immediately jumped back with a startled squeak at the dark-cloaked figure waiting for her.

She took a closer look. "Ren?? Don't  _ do _ that, oh my god! Didn’t ‘alf scare the life outta me, standin' there waitin'!"

**"Call me Grimdog,"** he smiled. His voice was unnaturally deep, but Stress could still easily pick out a familiar twang.  **"It's funny that you'd say** **_I_ ** **scared the life out of you, under the circumstances..."**

Stress swatted him on the arm. "Cut out the spooky act, will ya, and just tell me what's going on 'ere? Last fing I remember was doing those  _ stupid _ dares, and I thought I'd respawn at me castle if I lost. Where even am I??"

Grimdog paused for a moment, then pulled his hood back and grinned. "Welcome to the crypts, Stress," he said, back to his normal voice. “Sorry for your loss... although it is nice to have some company around here.”

Stress frowned. She thought it might have been a trick of the light on his hood at first, but now that Ren had lowered the hood, she was a little perturbed. “Now, ‘ang on a minute. Why are you all grey like that? Don’t tell me-” She looked down at her hands and groaned. “Ohhh nooooo, why am  _ I _ all sad and grey??”

Ren shrugged. "I guess that's just the way it has to be, you know?"

"It's even on me clothes..." Stress murmured. "What 'appens if I change my shirt? If I go get me spare jacket and put it on, would it stay pink or would it turn all dull as well?"

"Um..." Ren hesitated. "I, uh, never thought to try that. But speaking of trying things, Stress, I've been working on a trap to catch some warmbloods, and I'd like to get your help in getting it working and put in place. What do you think?"

"Oooh!" Stress exclaimed. "Traps, eh? I do like the sound of that."

\-----

It took them a while, but before they knew it, they had rigged a successful and very deadly trap in the middle of the shopping district. 

After they went their separate ways for the day, Stress made her way to Sahara. But she wasn't there to shop - she was there to build.

She wanted - no,  _ needed _ \- to build a trap for someone. But Stress didn't really want to kill anyone. She definitely didn't want to make anyone else end up with this stupid greyness. So her trap would be an annoyance to its victim (hopefully Grian, but she wasn't picky), but it wouldn't be lethal like the trap she had built with Grimdog. In fact, she had added a little something to the last item. Stress's magical abilities changed every time she started living somewhere new, and she wasn't always sure what she was capable of, but she hoped the spell she cast might help the victim dodge their demise a little longer.

Regardless of what happened, Stress hoped she'd get the chance to meet the victim of this trap later. She knew the result would be something to see.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> November 1 - Stress's luck ran out, and she became the second victim of Demise.


	4. The Restless Dead

_ "...and the man learned, from what had once been his most trusted companion, that dead dogs still bite." _

-

Xisuma felt like he was being watched.

"Be on your tip-and-toes," Keralis whispered, as Xisuma led him and Bdubs through the back rooms of IDEA. "There's two people on the dead team now, and I think I saw one sneaky-sneaking around nearby."

"On my tip-and-toes, eh?" Xisuma smiled at the new Keralis-ism, but heeded the warning. He had learned to trust Keralis's eyes.

A minute later, Bdubs' gaze snapped up to the top of an unfinished wall. "Ohh, and sure enough," he growled. "Look at Ren up there."

Xisuma followed where Bdubs was looking. Ren stood above them, wearing a black cloak and holding a trident in his left hand. The color seemed to drain from the very air as Ren stared them down. A warning light flashed in the corner of Xisuma's vision, telling him something was wrong about the situation, but he couldn't seem to take his eyes off Ren long enough to check.

Until two even bigger eyes appeared in front of his visor. "Sashwammy? Hello hello?"

Xisuma blinked and pulled away. A voice echoed in his mind, familiar, yet different.  **_Interesting..._ **

He looked over Keralis's shoulder, but Ren had disappeared.

\-----

The next morning, Xisuma treaded carefully through the gaming district toward the Speedy Pines Raceway. Ren had messaged him - oddly early, Xisuma thought, considering he himself had only woken up a few minutes prior - needing someone to help test the lap timers.

And there he was, in front of the entrance. Hands clasped behind his back. Face inscrutable behind a hood and dark sunglasses. He stood unmoving as Xisuma approached, then finally stepped aside and offered a friendly smile. "Hello X."

"Hi, Ren," Xisuma smiled, though behind his helmet, his expression was almost as unreadable as Grimdog's. “I, uh, saw you in IDEA earlier...”

“Um... that wasn’t me,” Ren tried, unconvincingly.

Xisuma raised an eyebrow. “Pretty sure it was.”

“Nahh.” Ren brushed it off. “I’ve been working here, you know? I really want to get Speedy Pines open soon.”

“Well... I’m always happy to help,” Xisuma decided. “I’m excited to race this once it’s open, too!”

“Well then,” Ren declared, gesturing toward the water elevator up to the starting line. Xisuma couldn’t help but notice the distortion creeping into Ren’s voice.  **“You first.”**

Xisuma eyed the pressure plate in front of the water column. “Uhh, after you.”

Ren gave Xisuma an exasperated look. “Really?” But he entered the elevator first, to demonstrate that it was safe.

Their banter continued up above, friendly but ever so slightly forced, as Ren walked Xisuma through the different buttons and levers that controlled Speedy Pines. Xisuma found himself avoiding looking directly at Ren. Perhaps he was concerned about that same strange hypnosis effect that Ren had imposed in IDEA, with no Keralis here today to snap them out of it. Or maybe he was just trying to ignore the warning that kept turning on whenever he looked at Ren. The warning told him that  _ something _ was wrong, but no cursory scans could identify exactly what. And visually, it seemed obvious: Ren was all grey, for goodness’ sake! But he still - mostly - acted like himself, so Xisuma pushed his worries aside, got in a boat at the starting line, and readied himself for a race.

As soon he dropped onto the track, all his concerns vanished. Xisuma's whole mind was focused on speed: staying in the fast lanes, drifting turns, pushing away from walls. This speedway really was incredibly fun.

Coming around the last turn, Xisuma saw that Ren had dropped down from the starting area, and was watching from next to the track. Xisuma whizzed past Ren and onto the finish line.

It took Xisuma a moment of exhilaration before he registered the hiss of fuses beneath him. "Wha- nononono-" In a sudden panic, Xisuma tried to jump out of the boat, but the motion overbalanced it and sent both him and the boat down the hole that had opened up. Xisuma splashed into a shallow pool of water. He looked up for a moment to see Ren poking his head over the side of the hole. TNT exploded around Xisuma, throwing him against a wall and activating the totem that he had just managed to fumble out of his pocket after dropping the oars of the boat. 

He looked back up at Ren with a sad, almost pleading expression. "Ren, I trusted you! I trusted-"

The second wave of TNT blew up. Xisuma's cry was cut off abruptly as his armor shattered and he burst into code.

Grimdog smiled at the fading chaos. Then he stood up, stepped forward - and vanished.

\-----

Xisuma woke to darkness. Oppressive, close, yet somehow... comfortable. For a moment, he thought he might be back in the void, although it had been a couple days since he had taken the dare to fly there.

Then he realized that he was surrounded by dirt. And someone was digging him up.

Sunlight streamed in, making Xisuma groan at the sudden brightness. The light refracted off a long crack that ran down his visor, across his right eye. His vision looked strange in general, and it took Xisuma a moment to realize that he was now looking through a green tint, instead of purple.

A grey hand reached down toward him. Xisuma accepted the help in climbing out of the hole, noticing that he was in a graveyard, and that none of the mechanisms or electronics in his suit were working. He looked up to thank the person, and found that it was none other than... "Ren. We meet again."

**"Grimdog, if you please,"** he corrected.  **"Welcome to the land of the dead, Xisumavoid."**

Xisuma reached ground level, tried to stand, and immediately staggered against a gravestone. "Ugh... this feels a little funky."

**"Being dead'll do that to ya,"** Grimdog replied.  **"You'll adjust soon."**

  
"What do you mean,  _ being _ dead?" Xisuma asked, confused. "I mean, I guess I'm on the dead team in Demise now, but-" At that moment, he finally noticed his grey skin, his faded armor. Out of habit, he first tried to check his vital signs on his helmet HUD, before remembering that it wasn't working. He tried the old-fashioned way instead, two fingers on his wrist. Nothing. He wasn't struggling to breathe because he wasn't breathing. He sat down, a bit heavily, on the gravestone he had been leaning against. "Oh, deary me." 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> November 9 - Xisuma let his guard down, and became the third victim of Demise.


	5. Artificial Wings

_ "He flew too close, and his wax wings melted away." _

-

Jevin sighed to himself as he passed another warped wall that didn't quite match the one on the other side. He'd have to come back and fix that some time. If only there was a way for him to just wave his hand and take care of all the little errors he'd made, all at once.

He'd deal with that later, though. He had another project to work on that needed some supplies from the shopping district. Not in the mood for a Nether trip today, Jevin climbed up on top of his floating base, opened his elytra, and took off.

**Odd.** The sudden voice almost sent Jevin careening into the ocean in surprise.  **Why aren't ye using your wings?**

Confused and more than a little perturbed, Jevin checked his elytra the best he could mid-flight. It was working exactly as intended. "I... am, though?"

**Not those useless bits of sticks and cloth,** the voice huffed.  **WINGS.**

"I don't know who - or what - I'm talking to here," Jevin remarked, "but elytra are the closest thing most people in this world have to actual wings. Dunno why you think I'd be any different."

There was a long silence, and Jevin briefly thought the strange entity might have given up. Finally, it replied once more.  **What** **_are_ ** **ye?**

Jevin burst out laughing. "Do you have any idea how many times I've heard that one before? I'm just a slime, man. Nothing special - just another weirdo." He set off a rocket to boost himself a little higher and faster.

**Just a slime...** the voice mused.  **That's why ye signed the book… We should have known, from the mere presence of a name. Ye aren't quite what we thought ye were. Ye are... something new?**

Jevin subconsciously closed his eyes to focus on what the voice was talking about. He fired another rocket. "What did you think I- why am I even talking to you? What are you doing in my head?"

**We can talk to anyone we please this way,** the voice declared.  **Anyone who accepted the terms. Almost everyone in this world - even the ones who were already in servitude have chosen us as their new master. They will join us in full soon enough. As for ye... ye are an odd one. We shall see whether ye can fall to our spell in a few moments...**

The air flowing past him changed. Jevin barely had time to open his eyes and see a wall rushing toward him, before he crashed headlong into it with a  _ SPLAT. _

\-----

Jevin woke with a frustrated and uncomfortable groan, back at his base. Impact respawns always kind of sucked, as his body seemed to briefly think it still needed to find its shape again even after he'd woken up. That building, whatever it was, had not been there the last time he had made that flight. He hit his fist against the side of the bedframe in annoyance, then noticed his hand had changed color. Jevin looked at it curiously. It looked almost like he had picked up a layer of soot somehow. He picked at the grey until it hurt. Nope, that was definitely a part of him. Now he could see he was still blue inside, though.

**The spell holds,** the voice observed, making Jevin jump.  **Although we of course can claim no control over ye.**

“Right, obviously,” Jevin muttered sarcastically. “Totally makes sense. Does that mean you’ll leave me alone now?”

**Of course not,** the voice replied, almost cheerfully.  **Ye may or may not have claimed the Players here, even if only by accident. Ye are still our rival.**

“Greeeeat.”

This attitude continued over the next days and weeks. Jevin did his best to go about his daily business with what he could only assume was the spirit of Demise watching his every move. Occasionally, he would give in a little bit to the spirit voice’s requests and lay traps, but none of his traps were designed to kill - only to scare. The spirit, in turn, gloated over every loss, every “new servant”. It never gave away anyone’s strategies, perhaps concerned that Jevin, with no obligation to it, would warn the non-grey hermits.

After almost a month of this, Jevin was starting to get annoyed. The spirit had upgraded from gloating and nudging to insults and attempted commands. It was incredibly distracting. One day, he sighed and finally asked, “Look, what will it take to get rid of you?”

The spirit laughed. Jevin hated that high-pitched laugh.  **We will be with ye anywhere in this world! We were going to leave ye once our victory was assured, but ye are too interesting!**

“I assure you, I'm not that interesting," Jevin reiterated with a dry chuckle. "Anywhere in this world...” He considered the spirit’s words. “Alright then. If you’ll bother me anywhere in this world, I’ll just go to a different one.” Before anything could convince him otherwise, he flew to worldspawn.

Once there, Jevin put everything from his inventory into a convenient ender chest, and opened his communicator. He sent a quick message to Xisuma. 

<iJevin> -> <Xisuma> Hey X, I need to take a break for a while. idk how much you know about why this grey thing is happening, but the voice of the thing behind it has been pestering me ever since I died

<iJevin> -> <Xisuma> I just need to clear my head. Literally and figuratively

**What are ye doing?**

“Getting rid of you, with any luck.”

<Xisuma> -> <iJevin> can’t say I have any idea what you mean, but if you need to get away, go ahead :)

<Xisuma> -> <iJevin> How long?

**We told ye, ye can’t get rid of us.**

“Well, then think of it as you getting rid of me.”

<iJevin> -> <Xisuma> Just until all this grey Demise weirdness is over

<iJevin> -> <Xisuma> I’ll have the signal on in case yall have to worldhop without me

<Xisuma> -> <iJevin> Alright then. We’ll be sure to call!

**We control him now. We can make him forget ye forever.**

Jevin hesitated. “No you can’t,” he accused. “Maybe as long as the game goes on. But when it’s done, I’ll bet you will be too. And I’ll always be connected to these people. I’ll drag myself back here if I have to.”

He hated to leave, when something screwy was happening that might need an unaffected hermit to fix it. He knew he was giving the disembodied voice exactly what it wanted from him. And he was just a little nervous that the voice might not be bluffing about its control over Xisuma. But he was sick of the voice’s taunts. He needed some time - and space - to think, where it couldn’t find him.

The spirit said nothing, but Jevin could almost feel its curiosity at what he was doing. He navigated through a few menus on his communicator, to a command that had been buried deep and was only usable at worldspawn, to prevent accidents. Jevin checked the options, making sure the admin tether was on. He didn’t want to lose this place forever. He pressed the button marked “Lone World”. A flash of green enveloped him.

**iJevin has left the world**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> November 13 - Jevin got distracted, and became the fourth victim of Demise.


	6. Poison Thorns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Death du jour doesn't have drowning per se, but kind of has brief mention of struggling in water? If you think it might bother you, it's the paragraph starting "His foot dropped a meter..."

_"The poison thorns had left nasty scars."_

-

There was something suspicious about this game, he could feel it. Something in Scar was telling him, almost begging him, to turn away, to leave that black board and never touch it. But an equally compelling feeling urged him forward. Urged him to at least see the rules, see what he’d be getting himself into.

This would be his last chance to sign up. He sighed and opened the book. It sounded like just a game. A fun way to maybe win some diamonds... not that he needed more diamonds. But it was _diamonds_ \- who cared about _need?_

Cub’s signature stood out to him on the sign-up page. Scar still didn’t know if he trusted the game, but apparently Cub was okay with joining in, and Scar trusted Cub. Scar gave in and scribbled his name at the bottom of the page. This might be fun... right?

\-----

Something felt wrong as soon as the game started. A strange heat, a familiar chill, washed over him at the moment it began. Scar wasn't sure what was happening, but he did notice that something was blocking his magic. He couldn't even fly; his wings hung lamely on his back, forcing him to awkwardly tuck them under his jacket and sling an elytra over the top to get around.

He should have probably talked to Cub about this. But Scar wasn't sure Cub would know any more about what was happening. Instead, Scar chalked it up to some kind of anti-cheat magic - not that he or Cub would cheat on purpose, but Vex magic would have given them a hugely unfair advantage in the game. He just felt funny because he was so used to having that magic at his disposal. That must be it.

\-----

There were a few people that had lost the game now, Scar knew. He kept an eye out for any suspicious redstone as he made his way to the shopping district portal in the middle of the Nether hub.

It was dark on the Overworld side. Pitch dark. Scar, still dizzy from the transfer, staggered to one side as he tried to get out of the purple gateway and reorient himself.

His foot dropped a meter before coming down hard on the corner of something. Thrown off balance, Scar tilted the other way. He flung out his other foot to catch himself, but found no purchase, and fell. His scared yelp was abruptly cut off with a splash in water below. As soon as he swam back up, gasping for breath, he was yelling again, as the poisonous spines of scared pufferfish dug into his skin. He thought he heard a laugh in the background, familiar, but just a little wrong.

Once the poison was in his system, Scar succumbed to his fate quickly. When he did, the communicators broadcast to all the other hermits a message - a warning.

**GoodTimeWithScar was slain by The Greyskins**

\----- 

The first thing Scar noticed was that the familiar feeling of magic was back - but something was just a little wrong. The second thing he noticed was that he was in an unfamiliar, very close space. It should have been suffocatingly close, but instead it almost felt comfortable. He opened his eyes, noting the faint blue glow on the dirt a few inches from his face.

Scar used his magic to quickly scoop away all the dirt that had been piled on top of him. He stood up, and out of habit tried to spread his wings.

His wings flicked open. Scar twisted to look in glad surprise, then fly-hopped out of the hole he was in. The setting diminished his happiness somewhat; awakening after death to find himself in a graveyard that he’d never even visited before seemed foreboding at best.

Scar fluttered up to the top of a crypt to dodge a creeper... and finally noticed the changes to himself. He had lost all his color. (And his shirt, somehow, but that wasn’t important. It often got in the way of his wings anyway.) Scar started to get nervous. He had heard rumors of Vex mages turning grey - not just their skin, but everything about them - and he didn’t know what would cause it, but he knew it was bad...

**Ye are ours now.**

Scar jumped. A Vex voice! He hadn’t heard a Vex since before the game started-

He registered what they had just said to him. The Vex laughed. It sounded familiar, but just a little wrong. And suddenly, Scar knew what had caused the problems, the disconnect with his magic and with “his” Vex.

He hadn’t been freed to use magic again. He had been stolen.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> November 17 - Scar was tricked, and became the fifth victim of Demise.


	7. The Undying Curse

_ "But invincibility has its downsides." _

-

There was something suspicious about this game, he could feel it. Cub almost turned away, refused the game. But he was one of only two people in this world equipped to handle magic like this. Cub decided to sign up, to investigate the truth from within.

When the game began, he, like many of the others, took to carrying around a totem of undying. Unlike many of the others, Cub also took to the thrill of using the totems to flirt with danger. Totems of undying did truly save his life on a number of occasions, but many more were broken just for his own amusement. 

He pulled deadly stunt after deadly stunt, escalating with every passing day. He fought the Wither just because he could, using three totems in the process. When the totems no longer provided enough of a thrill, he left them behind, challenging himself to survive his own death wish without them.

He couldn't explain what had gotten into him. It was fun, he supposed, more fun now that dying had extra consequences. The stakes were high, and he kept pushing them higher. Which led him, finally, to what he planned to call his Finest Hour.

\-----

Cub took a deep breath. Everything was ready for the show. He had been hoping for a little more turnout, but many of the hermits were probably nervous about the Greyskins in the audience.

He knew he was.

Xisuma was always hard to read at the best of times, but right now it seemed like he was trying even harder to be inscrutable, behind his cracked green visor.

And then there was Scar. Cub mostly just felt guilty about Scar. Scar has been acting strangely ever since his Demise, and despite a few conversations since then, he wouldn't - or couldn't - say quite what happened. This of course only furthered Cub's suspicions about this "game" as a whole. He should have told Scar those suspicions right away, should have at least tried to convince Scar not to sign the book. They both should have known better, honestly - they knew a thing or two about binding contracts.

But for now, the show must go on. Cub had a plan... maybe. And Tango was there too, at least, to root for him. After a few opening remarks, Cub started climbing the first scaffolding tower as the sun set.

It was dark before he reached the top. His palms were so sweaty he barely managed the climb. And he was going to do three of these?? He must be crazy.

Doing his show at night was not optimal, but he was up here now... the darkness did make it easier to see the glow of the lava below, but seeing anything besides that was tricky.

He was stalling. Cub nodded to himself as a final pep talk, backed up, and took a running jump off the tower.

His lab coat, unbuttoned for maneuverability, flapped behind him like a cape as he fell. The first platform sank deep under the impact, and its bounce paired with perfectly-timed pistons to launch him back into the air. The second bounce pad threw him just as smoothly as the first. And the third, the first of the smaller platforms. And the fourth-

Cub's foot landed half off the edge of the fourth slime block. He overbalanced, falling forward onto his hands and knees, all momentum lost.

He paused there for a moment, collecting himself, then stood up. He looked around at his audience and almost smiled at the irony of the situation. “Well,” he called out jokingly, “I guess now I’m stuck here forever.”

Xisuma and Scar laughed. Even Tango cracked a smile. "Hang on, Cubby, I'm coming to save you!" Tango called back.

Tango circled around to the right, blocks in hand. Cub kept an eye on him and Scar, who was skulking right behind. He briefly noticed Xisuma doing something in the other direction, but Cub suspected the nefarious business would happen as soon as Tango got close to the lava.

Before he got too close, though, something over Cub's shoulder drew Tango's attention. "Cub-!"

Cub spun around, just as a skeleton's arrow buried itself in his chest. He had nothing to block with, nowhere to dodge. The arrow's momentum knocked him backward, and he tumbled off the tiny platform into the lava below. He reached for safety, but he knew it was no use. Lava was a quick death.

\-----

Cub was not expecting to wake where he did.

He had set up a bed near the dares just in case, although a conversation with Scar yesterday had warned Cub that many of the Demised were respawning in the old graveyard. Cub expected that he would respawn in one of those two places. He would have even shrugged off going back to worldspawn, assuming the respawn might have tried to fix itself.

He did not expect to find himself floating directly above the lava where he’d died.

He looked around the challenge field. Scar gave Xisuma a high-five. Tango seemed at first to be looking at Cub, but was drawing his bow. Tango’s arrow passed right  _ through _ him and hit the skeleton that was still trying to cause trouble. Then Tango turned back to the beds and struck up a disappointed conversation with... Cub?

He was here, floating, apparently invisible, but he was looking down on... himself. Grey skin, yes, but still undeniably himself, chatting amicably with Tango as if nothing was wrong. It was bizarre to him, although his scientific nature soon turned to curiosity. Cub wondered if this was anything like what Scar experienced whenever B-

**What were ye thinking??**

It was a familiar voice, one Cub hadn’t heard in some time.  **Vexnos!** He exclaimed.

**Ye humans and names,** the Vex responded automatically. This was not the first time they had had this discussion. Vex didn’t have names for themselves, but this Vex’s servants had come up with a nickname for them. The scientist had explained that the name referenced the Vex’s power and influence over reality. They would never admit it to any of the Vex in their homeworld, but they had grown a little attached to being referred to as “Vexnos”.

**What’s going on?** Cub asked. He tried to gesture, but he didn’t seem to have any sort of form.  **Did you do... whatever this is, to me?**

**We did,** Vexnos replied,  **in an attempt to save you from that.** Cub’s attention was directed back toward the three grey people, particularly himself. “He” seemed to be getting ready to do his other challenges despite losing the first. Vexnos’s voice took on a more accusatory tone.  **But we can only hold ye here until your body dies again, from another stunt by the look of this, and ye are pulled back in. Ye signed the new contract.**

**I wanted to investigate,** Cub replied apologetically.  **I thought I could handle whatever was happening, but... I was really asking for it, wasn’t I? I was really asking for it. They must have gotten more of a grip on me than I thought.**

**They did,** Vexnos agreed.  **We noticed too late to keep our claim on the other. With ye, we were ready. We cannot break their deal directly, but we can keep our hold, and take ye back. If not now, then at the first chance we find. We think the deal will weaken when the game is won.**

**Sounds good to me, man,** Cub affirmed.  **I’d definitely prefer serving the Vex I asked to serve, rather than one that tricked us into it.**

As he watched himself climb the third tower, Cub felt Vexnos' magic flowing to him, stronger than he'd ever felt it before. He saw himself fall, miss, hit the solid ground.

Suddenly, he was back in his body. Thoroughly disoriented and nursing a headache he was pretty sure he shouldn't have, Cub rolled out of bed, aided by Xisuma and Scar. "...can't blame me, then," he barely caught Xisuma joking.

The pressure built as the banter faded. When the four finally went their separate ways, Cub staggered to the ground. The power of two different Vexes swirled and fought within him, neither able to drive away the other.

**Overwhelm them,** Vexnos instructed, and Cub understood. He turned to the ender chest that was thankfully already within reach, opened it, and reached as deep as he could manage. There, he found the item he needed, and it gave him the strength to haul it out into the open.

Amid the protests of the rival Vex, Cub brought his mask to his face.

The burst of extra power brought spots to Cub's vision. Already kneeling, he now crumpled completely as the Vex used him for their battleground. He started shivering, the magic chilling him to the bone. After enduring wave after wave of conflict, Cub's senses finally, blessedly, went black.

\-----

He woke elsewhere this time, a magical glow revealing close quarters around him. The magic came from him. It had muddied his thoughts before, but now his mind was crystal clear. He noticed, idly - with some satisfaction, even - that the shape of his face had changed, molding itself to match the mask that he had been wearing before. The mask that he must have been counting on to save him, but that ultimately brought him nothing but pain. Being reshaped to fit his master’s needs was so much more reliable.

With a laugh, he rose easily through the ground, on wings spread wide and proud. Why had he fought this? He was free. Free at last to use his magic again, stronger than ever. Free to do whatever he wanted to bring more people under his master’s control.

There was another reason to lace the world with traps at every step, he thought... but he couldn’t remember it. Oh well. He would bring the other hermits down as effectively as he could - there was no need to know why.

Yes, they would all fall soon, to his hand or to each other’s. Their demise was inevitable.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> November 19 - Cub thought he was up for the challenge, and became the sixth victim of Demise.


	8. The Outsider

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: robot gore (paragraph starting "The figure turned toward him"); brief character-turned-zombie imagery (paragraph starting "Zedaph screamed").

_ "They defied their instincts, heeding the words of a stranger instead. But following the outsider led them to ruin." _

-

"Are you insane??"

Tango and Impulse glanced at each other. They had not been expecting to get chewed out by Zedaph this morning.

"Um... not that I know of?" Tango questioned. "Why do you ask?"

"That- that game that everyone's getting themselves into. When does it start, tomorrow? You've got to leave that game."

"Even if we wanted to," Impulse explained, "I don't think we can. We signed our names in the book. Why does it matter? It's just a game."

"It is not 'just a game' and you know it," Zedaph scolded. "Or, well.  _ I _ know it. I can  _ tell _ every time I walk by that board. Something fishy is going on."

Tango fidgeted with his hands. "I guess I have been feeling a little weird ever since I entered," he admitted. "I hadn't really noticed until just now though. Just figured it was general excitement or something."

Impulse shrugged. "It seemed okay to me. It'll be fun, come on! There's still some time left for you to try it, Zed... unless you're just afraid you'll lose to us, of course."

Zedaph shook his head vehemently. "No, no, no! Also I would totally last longer than either of you two. But no, I've had enough dealings with Death in the past, thank you very much. I will not be touching this game with a three-meter pole."

"Alright, man," Impulse conceded. "Just don't expect a cut of the prize money when we win..."

"I don't want cursed diamonds any more than I want my name in a cursed book," Zedaph declared. "Are you sure you can't erase your names or something?"

"We could try," Tango decided, "but like Impulse said, I don't think it'd work."

"Well, thank you for trying," Zedaph relented. "I don't know whether to root for or against you because I have no idea whether winning or losing would be worse. Just... be safe, okay? And don't come crying to me if you end up as some kind of cursed zombies or something."

\-----

“Impulse, I’m tired of this.”

Impulse and Tango stood in Tango’s storage room, some distance away from his Nether portal so that they could hear each other over the incessant clicking of empty dispensers.

"It's getting ridiculous," Impulse agreed. "They're putting traps in our own bases! I mean, who DOES that?"

"Someone should do something about it," Tango declared, in a tone of voice that gave away exactly  _ who _ should be doing something.

"Tango..." Impulse warned. "We've seen what happens when someone dies to this game. You've  _ talked _ to Greyskins, dude! And Zed made us promise to stay safe..."

"Yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah, but hear me out," Tango explained, getting more excited. Impulse almost missed his friend's eyes flickering slightly as Tango paced closer to the portal. "We aren't the only ones who have to be careful.  _ Everyone _ is in the game. If we're going around defusificating traps, that's good for  _ everyone,  _ right? Including us!"

Impulse rolled his eyes. Looked like he wasn't getting out of this one. "If you say so, man. Let's do it. Starting with this annoying dispenser trap on your portal."

  
  
  


The next trap they found was in the shopping district. "And of course it's at a ConCorp shop," Impulse laughed.

"Of course," Tango agreed. "You got the thingy? I'm getting weird vibes just being near this place."

"I sure do!" Impulse set down a machine that looked like a camera with feet. He pulled out a remote control. At Tango's raised eyebrow, Impulse preempted him with "I know what you're going to say, but let's try my rig for this thing first."

The fourth time the camera drone wandered off just before reaching the pressure plates, Tango sighed. "Just let me do it."

"But-" Impulse started. But Tango's head had already dropped to his chest, eyes dark. The drone stopped wandering and turned to look directly at Impulse.

Impulse gave it an exasperated look. “You could have at least moved a little farther away from the trap before you transferred.”

The camera beeped and made a motion that Impulse could only guess was a shrug. 

“Well, I’m standing back here. In fact, I’m going to stand behind you.”

The camera bot bobbed up and down in a nod, then trotted over to the line of pressure plates at the entrance to the store. As soon as he heard the telltale hiss of a fuse igniting, Tango disconnected from the little bot, reconnecting to his body just in time to catch himself as the force of the explosion knocked him back into Impulse.

Tango gave a wild laugh, wilder than Impulse felt was maybe warranted. “See? Everything’s fine! I don’t think the little guy even got destroyed.” Sure enough, the walking camera, now damaged and unattached to any control source, was running around the crater like a chicken with its head cut off.

  
  
  


The underground mall was their last stop for the day. The carpeted floors and many shops were all prime locations to trap. But, upstairs, they got distracted investigating a new shop: Deny Your Demise. It sold potions and armor, and seemed to have popped up overnight. Yet, despite the space being empty yesterday, the shop seemed strangely familiar to Tango and Impulse - almost as if they themselves had built it in their sleep.

Maybe it was this familiarity that led them to let their guard down. Maybe they were fatigued from disarming traps all day. Or maybe something else was present, reassuring them that everything was safe...

Tango flitted from chest to chest, almost manic despite the work they’d done that day. The glow in his eyes flickered wildly as he explored the space. Impulse was drawn in, too, by Tango’s insane enthusiasm, and a fleeting whisper of his own conscience assuring him that it must be fine. 

And then Tango opened the catalog on the lectern.

Pistons fired, dropping both of them into a pit too deep to escape in time. Explosives fell around them. The traps they had seen throughout the day had all been small - potentially deadly, but simple to escape or avoid. But this time, there was no chance.

\-----

Tango awoke to an overwhelming sense of  _ cold. _ ...That couldn’t be right. He wasn’t supposed to be able to feel temperature like that. Especially not from inside.

He shuddered. Had he even lost consciousness in the first place? His normally impeccable sense of time was missing. A lot of things were missing, actually. He felt... empty.

He tried to call out, but his voice wouldn’t work. Instinctively, his hand went to his chest - and then  _ into _ his chest. No wonder he had felt so...  _ hollow.  _ Everything that usually kept him running was either broken or missing. His power source, his heart, was completely gone, and yet he was still conscious. Circuits were destroyed left and right, and yet... and yet... 

Static washed across the remains of his mind. He found himself shaking in silent laughter. He was not himself anymore. Someone else had taken over his burnt-out shell. And there wasn’t enough left of him to care.

\-----

Zedaph pelted through the shopping district, calling for his friends. "Tango? Impulse??"

He had seen the death messages. He had asked in chat where they were, with no response. He had checked worldspawn, and both of their bases, and now he was criss-crossing every populated area he could think of. Every hermit so far had reacted differently to the Demise effect; Zedaph had to know what had happened.

Movement caught Zedaph's attention. He looked, and thought he saw a glimpse of red eyes under the grey figure's dark hood. "...Tango?"

The figure turned toward him. Zedaph gasped. It was Tango, alright. Tango... with a gaping hole, rimmed with scorched and twisted metal, where his chest should have been. Zedaph could see all the way through to where ribbed bits held together Tango's  _ back. _ Broken circuits inside sparked blue instead of red. And the way he looked at Zedaph... it was so dull, so lifeless, so  _ not _ Tango.

Not-Tango leered at Zedaph and drew his sword. Zedaph backed away, heart racing. "Tango, buddy, it's me," he stammered. "It's me, Zed, I'm not even part of the game, please-"

Zedaph bumped into someone else. He whirled around just as Impulse turned to face him.

Zedaph screamed. Impulse was almost zombie-like, skull broken open enough to see a bit of brains inside. And the dead, white eyes... they reminded him too much of Herobrine's eyes. Zedaph stumbled backward, fell on his butt, scrambled back to his feet, and ran for his life.

\-----

He had no idea where he was going; he just needed to get away. Away from the shopping district, from that cursed "game", from-

From his friends. Oh god, he'd just run away from his two best friends in the entire world, after spending all day trying to find them. Zedaph slipped to his knees, tears starting to streak down his face. Those weren't his friends, he reminded himself. They were... they were  _ husks. _ Not actual Husks, from the desert, but husks as in- well, they were both some kind of mindless zombie now, weren’t they? And it did make him sick, just seeing them like that. Cursed by whatever horrible magic...

Zedaph finally looked around at where he was. He knelt in front of a grand entryway, gated by a simple fence and guarded by an evoker, who eyed him curiously.

Zedaph stood and crept closer. "Hi, um... it's getting dark out. May I come inside?" He didn't speak Villager - translating was usually Impulse's job - so he had no idea if the evoker understood him, but it made no move to stop him as he went through the gate.

Zedaph knew this place, though he'd never really visited. He knew what type of magic was all around him as he walked the grounds. And suddenly, he realized why the magic of Demise had felt so familiar.

**Welcome, unbound one.**

Zedaph practically jumped out of his skin. He spun around frantically, looking for the source of the high, grating voice. "Who's there? I-I'm sorry for trespassing, I just-"

**If we wanted ye gone, the guard would have already killed ye.**

“Oh. W-well, what  _ do _ you want me here for?” Zedaph tried to keep a cocky, joking air, despite his fear, and kept glancing around. A carved relief of a face on a hillside (a ‘cliff face’, he thought, almost smiling) stood out to him in the fading light, the eyes and mouth faintly glowing. The magic throughout the compound seemed to pour from it.

**Ye are the only Player in this world who has not been claimed.**

"Because I didn't sign up for the game?" Zedaph realized. "Wait- is me being unclaimed good or bad?” His panic started to show. “Are you the- the one who cursed Demise??"

**We would not,** the voice - the Vex - declared.  **We had our servants already. Interesting, creative servants, who carried us with them to explore across worlds. They were worth more than a hundred mindless slaves. But our servants have been stolen by another Vex, and ye are the only Player remaining who may be useful to us.**

“I-I’d rather not,” Zedaph stammered. “Unless... hang on. If this whole Demise thing is Vex magic, then you can break it! Except you can’t, else you would have done to get Cub and Scar back, right.” He started pacing, fear nearly forgotten as he puzzled out what was happening. He snapped his fingers. “You can’t  _ yet. _ And for some reason, you need a human or a servant or something to help you, which is why your guard let me in!”

**We need to know more about what has happened,** the Vex confirmed.  **It would not do for the other to see a rival Vex spying on their collection. Once we know how to twist their contract, we can reclaim what is ours.**

“Loopholes,” Zedaph nodded. “I like your style. Or, well, I like your style when it’s not aimed at me. Because you’re going to ask me to serve you ‘for a time’ or whatever, and I’m going to go in expecting to be freed as soon as you get Cub and Scar back, and you’re just going to keep me, aren’t you?”

The Vex didn’t answer.

“Just as I thought,” Zedaph remarked. “I’m a nice guy, though, and I want to see everyone normal again too. How about this? I will help you get your servants back. BUT!” He held up one finger dramatically, with no idea whether the disembodied voice could see what he was doing. “I am helping as a  _ friend, _ not as a servant myself. You won’t give me magic, or a spooky mask, or have any control over what I do, or anything like that. And when you do break the other Vex’s deal, you break it for EVERYONE, not just ‘your’ people. Anything less, and there’s no deal. I’ll... report back to you with whatever I find, I guess?”

**Fine,** the Vex answered grudgingly. It was a pretty unfair trade, in their opinion, but they could see Zedaph would be too stubborn to accept anything else.  **With one allowance. Ye will allow us to co-inhabit your body, at any time, until we have our original servants back. We will not take control or grant magic, but we will be able to talk to ye and use your senses as we would with a servant. We will give commands and expect ye to follow, but will not carry them out by force.**

Zedaph thought this over for a long moment. Finding it satisfactory, he nodded. “Very well,” he declared. “You have... a deal.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> November 25 - Tango and Impulse sacrificed themselves, and became the seventh and eighth victims of Demise.


	9. The Lives of Dragons

_ "A dragon protects her young by hiding them in her mouth. However, if the dragon is threatened, a dragonet might get burned." _

-

**What was that?**

Zedaph looked where Vexnos indicated. He stifled a laugh.  _ That’s Iskall, judging by the green suit, but they're wearing a dragon head for some reason. My goodness, that looks ridiculous. _ Over the past few days, he had figured out how to “talk” to the Vex without actually speaking for people to overhear. Very helpful when he was hiding in a bush, spying on whoever walked by.

**Follow them.** Zedaph shrugged, but did so, creeping from bush to building to plant.  **Why are they wearing it? Do dragons have controlling magic, as we do?**

_Not that I know of,_ Zedaph answered. _Nothing that works on humans, anyway. Whoa!_

Iskall had stopped to talk to Grian and Mumbo - both of whom also wore dragon heads. Their faces were barely visible through the mouths of the masks.

_ How many people ARE there with those things on now? _ Zedaph wondered. He snuck closer.  _ And why- ah. None of them can take the dragon heads off. _

**How can ye tell?**

_ I dunno, _ Zedaph shrugged.  _ I just can. Curse of Binding has a certain feel to it, I guess. Those heads do have their own magic, too, I think... I guess I could be wrong about what I was saying earlier, but I’m also not sure that’s End magic? _

**Whatever it is, it seems like magic worth investigating further. Even though... ‘Demise Guy’, as ye call them... is not using mask control, a different mask magic could still interfere in ways they do not expect.**

_ I agree, _ Zedaph replied.  _ But I don’t think it’d work if I just popped out of this plant all ‘hi do you have a moment to talk about your weird dragon cult?’, would it? I’ll make sure to talk to one of them soon. _

\-----

Grian yelped as he suddenly fell out of the sky.

He crashed painfully onto the concrete just outside Area 77. Fortunately, he hadn’t been flying that high when his elytra ripped. Or maybe unfortunately, he thought as he gingerly tried to get up. If he had fallen from a deadly height, the totem he was holding would have activated, and its regenerative magic would have brought him back to fighting fit in no time. Instead, he would have to deal with roadburn, a twisted ankle, and possibly a cracked rib or something, until his body’s natural regeneration finally caught up.

He shook his head. At least that wasn’t too badly damaged - the oversized dragon headpiece apparently provided a bit of protection after all. He did his best to straighten out the bits of the snout that had crumpled upon impact with the ground, so he could see better. Finding only badly damaged backup elytra in his ender chest, Grian sighed and decided to go back to one of his bases for now.

He'd been having a lot of close calls lately, it seemed like. TNT blasts while mining, the trap outside iTrade, a creeper that came VERY close to killing him, and now his elytra breaking mid-flight... Or maybe he was just noticing them more. Despite it all, Grian was still planning to snoop around the Greyskins’ operation - the “Deadquarters”, they called it. He had gotten a suspicious invitation, and wanted to case the place first.

By chance, he arrived at night, because of course it would be night when he decided to explore the spookiest place around. 

He had to admit, the Deadquarters looked really cool - not that he expected much less. Grian poked around the grounds first. The floating island was just as spooky as the rest of the place, covered in dead trees and bare dirt. 

Grian stumbled over a chest buried in the ground. Out of habit, he opened the chest. He immediately closed the chest and backed away.  _ That was really stupid. _ The chest, as it turned out, was just decoration. But now Grian was all too aware of how his habit of pressing, pulling, and opening everything in sight could get him in real trouble when anything could be a deadly trap.

A soft footstep made Grian jerk his head up, on guard. The entryway was a few meters away. Xisuma was standing in it, watching him. Maybe Xisuma was just curious at the sound, but his eyes weren’t visible - behind his visor, it looked like there was only void. It made him look all the more ominous. Like he was waiting.

A crossbow appeared around the corner, quickly followed by a face with the most terrifying, twisted grin that Grian had ever seen. Grian bailed, diving off the edge and swooping up on his elytra to get another look. Was that  _ Cub?? _

In the few moments it had taken for Grian to regroup, the dead watching him had been joined by an equally horrifying Tango. Grian had worked with Tango enough times to brush off his eyes as just a normal thing, but against the grey skin, with a dark hood and hollow void of a chest, Tango’s red eyes were especially unnerving. Tango waved, a usually-jaunty and very Tango motion, but rendered stiff, deliberate,  _ wrong. _ Xisuma and Cub pointed their weapons.

Grian circled for a moment. They seemed to just be watching.

He looked again. One by one, in quick succession, each dove out of the entrance and swooped toward him, looking just like the phantoms that were starting to attack from above. Grian panicked and rushed for the portal. It was time to leave.

\-----

He returned the next day - this time, with backup. Another “Dragon Bro” stood beside him, long blond hair poking out below the dragon head as she and Grian marveled at the giant floating mansion. And of course, due to planning time (and maybe some sort of spooky magic, it was hard to say), it was the middle of the night. Again.

The invitation had said to bring a friend, so Grian had brought along, in his opinion, possibly the most competent person in the dragon club. False and Grian quickly swept up to the entrance of the Deadquarters. This time, no one was waiting for them.

After a moment’s hesitation, Grian sprinted forward, yelling “BROOOOO!” As soon as he heard a noise beneath him, he jumped and pulled his elytra into a quick glide, just clearing the lava trap that had opened beneath him. The first trick had been conquered! 

False crossed more cautiously. They looked up and down the hallway, deciding which way to go first. They had only been told to explore the first floor, but Grian tried climbing the stairs anyway. Finding the way blocked by redstone ore, he readied his pick - then thought better of it. The ore’s reaction to contact was how the entrance trap had been triggered. And they weren’t supposed to be up there anyway. As if in response to the pick, the timbers of the mansion creaked ominously. Grian took the hint.

They chose the lit path first. Grian drank two potions, grimacing at the feeling of heat that washed over him with the fire resistance, and once again rushed the hallway. He heard potions smashing behind him, but only felt the sharp spike of pain from one. False once again used more caution, waiting for the burgundy clouds to clear before racing in on her elytra.

They congratulated themselves on making it through, poking and prodding at the floor a bit more to see exactly what they’d dodged. Grian pulled the diamond sword out of the holder on the wall. The house creaked again. Grian thought he heard the same laugh that he’d encountered when he started this whole thing. He almost said something to False... then didn’t. He still didn’t want to admit to anyone that he was somewhat responsible for the grey curse, and by extension the strange and horrible transformations that some of the hermits had undergone. He hadn’t  _ known _ this would happen. But he  _ had _ stolen a book that was probably haunted from a creepy abandoned woodland mansion and held it in his hands as he built the game of Demise around it.

He also wouldn’t admit to himself how frightened he was becoming of his own game. The last time he had seen Ren, Ren was just grey - nothing else was different. But he hadn’t seen Ren in weeks, and he HAD seen the macabre new forms of Xisuma, Cub, and Tango. Grian was terrified that he might end up like them.

There wasn’t much more to explore in the Deadquarters, as it turned out. A few decorative rooms, some trapped, some not, and an unfinished dungeon that both agreed had a weird vibe and shouldn’t be investigated too closely. Especially not the armor stand effigy of Keralis on the table.

None of the dead had been lurking around, as far as they knew. Neither of them had died. There was no apparent prize. They left with only the diamond sword, some confusion, and a lingering sense of dread.

\-----

Grian made his way down to the dragon-shaped base under Sahara. He hesitated at the piston door, but when the pressure plates didn’t seem to activate anything, he decided it was fine and stepped inside. He had some additions in mind to build here.

As he planned and built, a feeling of dread grew in his mind. He tried to push it aside. He had entered this room without a problem, and had touched no redstone since then. But it kept coming back, an almost instinctive paranoia. Absurdly, he briefly wondered if the dragon head was trying to tell him something.

He put a sign on the wall. Before he could get out something to write with, he felt a sudden spike of panic. Something was wrong, he had to get  _ out- _

But the warning came too late. Redstone started clicking. Explosives poured from the ceiling. Grian scrambled away, but never reached the door before he, and the entire Dragon Bros base, was blown apart.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 10 - Grian tempted fate, and became the ninth victim of Demise.


	10. Funeral for the Living

_ "Her mind wandered as she half-listened to the man reading off the obituaries. She almost missed it when he read off a familiar name: her own." _

-

Player funerals were rare in respawn-capable worlds. When they did happen, they were played for the novelty, with nothing serious behind them. As could be evidenced by Grian delivering his own eulogy.

False’s Demise had been a last-minute surprise for the other Dragon Bros. She had been the first to die to a trap at her own base: a frankly ludicrous amount of explosives that she had immediately, and correctly, blamed Cub for.

The “ceremony” continued. Grian jumped into a fake grave that they had dug in the Dragon Bro Cave especially for the occasion, and Mumbo and Bdubs tossed in some random items before covering Grian in soul sand. There was another grave beside him for False, but first Mumbo and Bdubs had to say a few words for Grian and the Bros.

Mumbo stepped up to the lecterns. “I’ve been a Dragon Bro now for about a week, and... I’m still sure this is a cult.”

“It’s not a cult!” came Grian’s muffled voice from underground.

\-----

When all was said and done, False and Grian dug themselves out of the ground and started to go their separate ways like nothing had happened. On her way out of the cave, though, False was stopped by someone unexpected.

“False! Hi!” Zedaph called out nervously. “Um... can I have a chat? Please don’t kill me.”

False frowned. "You're not even part of Demise. Why would I kill you?"

"Oh, you'd be surprised," Zedaph murmured, rubbing his head.

"Well," False prompted, sitting on a ledge and patting the spot next to her. "What did you need to chat about?"

"The, uh." Zedaph sat in the spot and made a vague gesture. "The... dragon thing? Obviously you're not really a part of it now, since you lost the head, but you  _ were, _ and I'd kinda like to know what was up with that."

"I don't know how much help I'll be," False chuckled. "I was kind of their newest member. Or I still am, I guess - Grian and I did promise not to try and Demise the other Dragon Bros. But I don't really know what was going on for the most part."

Zedaph paused and suddenly got a faraway expression, as if listening to something that only he could hear. He turned back to False. "You promised not to go after them? I thought the Greyskins were all, like... compelled to go after any living hermit they could? Expand their ranks and all?"

False thought about that for a moment. “I guess so... maybe I have been too, a little, but in terms of the other Bros I just ignore that, if that makes sense?”

"Yeah..." Zedaph responded, a little distractedly. “Maybe it takes less force of will than I thought to get past that. Has anything else odd happened to you while you were wearing that dragon head?”

“Well...” False hesitated. “The trap that killed me was set off by my mining up a marker I’d placed, yeah? Well, as I was breaking it, I  _ knew _ something was wrong. I didn’t know what, though, and by the time I’d processed that, the marker was broken, and I saw the observer, and, yeah.” She shrugged. “And now here I am.”

“You’re awfully casual about being... y’know.” Zedaph gestured. “I feel like being dead should be cause for concern. And you’re not even concerned about your lack of concern! Is that not concerning?”

False broke into laughter. “I guess so! But it’s not that bad, really. A little weird, not having a heartbeat and that, but it’s fine. Thank you for your...  _ concern _ on my behalf.”

Zedaph started giggling along with her. “You’re welcome! That’s my job, you know: I get to be concerned about things.” He cut himself off as he saw Cub casually heading in their direction. “And speaking of being concerned, I’d better go-”

“Zed, wait!” False stood up with him and put her hand on his shoulder. “You’re sure there’s nothing else you need to know?”

“I-if there is, I’ll find you later!” Zed decided, pulling away. “I just-” 

He started to trot away, then jumped and opened his elytra. Just before Zedaph fired a rocket, Cub leveled his crossbow and fired. Zedaph grunted and stumbled forward, skin now slightly glowing from the spectral arrow lodged in his back. He tried to take off again. This time, Cub let him go.

False rounded on Cub. “What did you do that for?? You’d already scared him off, you didn’t need to  _ shoot _ him!”

Cub turned toward her, and False fought the urge to recoil or look away. She had seen him from afar since he'd Demised, but never face-to-face. Cub chuckled a bit. "I thought it'd be funny. You didn't think it was funny?" Even though he spoke aloud, his mouth never moved, staying in a fixed grin.

"Not particularly," False informed him. "Maybe if it were someone on the living  _ team, _ but Zed's not even playing!"

"I mean, if he was playing, we wouldn't be allowed to shoot him at all," Cub pointed out. "No direct engagement and all that."

  
"You are horrible," False huffed, turning to leave. "With this curse changing you all like  _ that, _ I can't believe I was even kind of excited to have Demised."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 12 - False’s reflexes weren’t enough, and she became the tenth victim of Demise.


	11. True To Form

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tw for near-drowning in the paragraph right after the fifth _thump._

_ "They were the best of friends. She would trust them with her life." _

-

Cleo reread the rules and sighed. She didn’t expect the players of this game she was trying to sign up for to  _ actually _ become undead like herself upon losing, but the rules still seemed to imply that one could only play in the first place if one was, you know, alive. Whether or not she could play, she almost ignored the game on principle - making death a loss and casting undead as the bad guys was a little offensive, in her opinion. And most of the undead didn’t really have enough brains left to have an opinion of their own...

...There were already 500 diamonds in the prize pool and not everyone had even dropped by the board yet. Cleo did some quick math and realized that that number would almost double if everyone signed up, and judging by the general gossip, everyone probably would. That amount of money was worth signing up for anyway, she decided. But she was still going to make a statement about it. The wording of the rules pretty clearly excluded undead, i.e. her, so she would find a way around the letter of the law.

And so, here she was back on her ship, brewing a potion that she didn’t usually keep around - too much potential for  _ accidents. _

As it brewed, it gave Cleo time to think. She didn't particularly WANT time to think, or she might talk herself out of it. She wasn't always a zombie, she reminded herself. She had been human before, once upon a time. She'd managed. She'd survived... until she didn't.

Except she had survived, sort of, with most of her faculties intact. It had been a very long time since that little... incident. The method to "cure" zombies hadn't been discovered yet. By the time it was, Cleo had grown accustomed to the undead lifestyle, even preferred it over humanity, despite humans generally not trusting her to be around them. When someone finally did stick around... well, that someone was Joe, and that's how she ended up here.

The potion was ready. She grabbed it off the brewing stand, dug an almost-forgotten golden apple out of a food crate, and headed upstairs before she changed her mind.

As Cleo stepped onto the deck, a few of her armor stand "crew" paused their pantomime to look up and wave at or salute their captain. The first time they had done that, it surprised her; she hadn't ever commanded them to do that, and didn't expect them to be able to act autonomously. But it was harmless - nice, even, that they recognized her authority over them - so she let it slide.

Safe in her quarters, Cleo stared into her own face - the un-animated statue sitting at the map table - and considered the potion once more. She grimaced at it. What was she thinking? She should just leave it be, go back to her puppet crew as their undead captain...

900 diamonds. That would be around how much she’d win. It’d be a challenge - humans were fragile creatures, all things considered. She would have to remember to deal with a few things she took for granted right now, like not breathing, or like a hole in her side being a minor inconvenience. She wasn’t sure she was admitting to herself just how scared of this she was. But that much treasure? That might be worth turning human for.

She chugged down the potion.

Immediately, her arms felt heavy. Cleo almost dropped the empty bottle. She should probably have lay down for this. She fumbled for the golden apple and ate as much of it as she could manage without feeling sick.

A shiver washed through her - and she kept shivering. Her hands shook so much that she did drop the remnants of the apple. Cleo moved to the entrance and leaned on the doorway. Then she lurched forward and almost fell down the steps, startled by a sudden  _ thump _ in her ears.

Every part of her screamed that she had made a mistake. What was she  _ thinking?? _ This was wrong, this was-

_ Thump. _

Her thoughts spiraled. She staggered across the deck. The skin on her right side felt weird, like it was trying to stretch across a gap, to  _ heal. _ Something at the base of her ribcage spasmed.

_ Thump. _

The sound was getting more frequent. It was familiar, but she wasn’t in a state right now where she could figure it out.

_ Thump. _

She staggered against the railing, still shivering. Her crew was looking at her. If they could show expressions, if Cleo didn’t know better, she would swear they looked concerned.

_ Thump. _

Without a sound from anyone on the ship, Cleo tipped overboard.

_ Thump. _

Air escaped from her lungs as she sank. Her vision started to dim. She thought she saw another shape descending nearby, coming closer. A Drowned, no doubt. A perfectly ironic punishment for attempting such a foolish endeavor. Cleo closed her eyes and waited to die.

  
  
  


The first thing Cleo noticed when she woke up back in her bed was that she could still hear that incessant beating sound, and her groggy mind still couldn’t make sense of it. Squinting at the bright sun filtering onto her face, she automatically reached for the fire resistance potion she kept on the nightstand. She felt around, then looked over at her hand. All at once, everything clicked into place. The weakness potion. The apple. The  _ sound _ that she realized was coming from her chest, which now moved up and down gently as she lay collecting herself. Her hare-brained idea had actually worked.

There was also... a note on her nightstand? It was folded, and signed  _ “From your crew”. _ She picked it up and squinted at it.

_ Dear Cleo, _

_ You are an idiot. _

That was awfully rude, especially coming from creations that weren’t even supposed to be sentient, much less smart enough to  _ write. _

Cleo skimmed the rest of the note. From the looks of things, she hadn’t actually died underwater at all - her crew had pulled her back on board. She wondered if they had any capacity to understand that she would have returned here just fine even if she had died. Then again, it was probably better not to die in the middle of the horrible process of turning-

Of turning human. It finally started to sink in, what she’d done. She wrapped her arms around herself nervously. She could  _ feel _ everything around her, more than before, and suddenly felt a little fragile. So many systems running inside her that could fail. So many potential causes of pain. Cleo felt sick at the thought.

Her stomach gurgled at her. No, she reminded herself, not sick -  _ hungry. _ On top of everything else, she was going to have to remember to do things like  _ eat. _

This was going to be a long few weeks.

\-----

A board creaked. Cleo jumped to the side of the walkway, glancing around nervously. 

Then she realized it had creaked under  _ her _ foot. She sighed and continued walking through Tortuga. Now she was twitchy AND her stupid heart was beating even more noticeably than usual.

She wasn’t staying here long, but she needed to pick up some items to take with her. And now that she’d been jumpscared by her own movements, she might just do some building here to calm her nerves. The town wasn’t yet completed to her liking, after all, and she didn’t want to let a little paranoia stop her.

Once she had added a new building, half-destroyed by cannon fire, Cleo packed a few shulker boxes and left her little armor stand town for a while. It was like a vacation, she told herself. It was  _ fine. _

She moved from place to place, never staying at any one for more than a few days. Between the anxiety, the unfamiliar surroundings, and her constant beating heart, she found it hard to sleep more nights than not. Cleo built one base, built austerely out of glass and water, as a test - could she stay in one place securely? The answer was no. Within days, the glass platform was filled with creatures imported by the Greyskins to kill her. Only her cautious approach saved her.

One hermit, though, had been living in one place this whole time. Tucked away right under everyone’s noses, with a base already designed to withstand outside threats. And so Cleo - boating, rather than flying, due to some recent Greyskin taunts - made her way to the world’s center of activity to pay a visit to TFC.

Well, she didn’t really  _ visit _ him, in the traditional sense. She just found her way inside the vault, then picked an out-of-the way corner and dug her own hideout into the walls. Somehow, she felt safer already. To amuse herself, and hopefully TFC, Cleo “populated” his courtyard with armor-stand people, given basic commands to move just enough to seem alive. He would know she was here now, yes, but that was also comforting, even though trust was dangerous in this game. If Demise took him before it took her, Cleo could always move out again.

Still, she found herself wishing for some  _ actual _ social contact. So when she was invited on a tour of a new build, she accepted the offer, despite having explored the building before to help them decorate it.

None of them knew how to make conversation as they walked through IDEA. Cleo’s eyes kept being drawn to the silly-looking dragon mask over Bdubs’ head. They tried a salesman schtick on her in the showrooms, but Cleo had seen the rooms before. They shunted her hastily through the unfinished back hallways and up the one-way-staircase exit “through the gift shop”.

She turned back toward them with a slightly sardonic expression. “To be fair, though, they don’t really have a gift sh-” Cleo’s comment was cut off by her shriek as she discovered that the dropoff was much deeper than expected.

She crashed painfully to the ground below, her armor saving her from immediate death. But it wouldn’t save her for long; she could already feel the draining ache of the wither roses she had crushed beneath her. Above, she could just make out two scared faces peering over the edge of the pit. Well, she hoped they were scared - it was hard to tell from this distance, since Keralis almost always looked scared and Bdubs’s face was mostly obscured by that weird dragon head.

“I trusted you!” Cleo cried. “I-” She winced at the wither effect.

Bdubs and Keralis shared a glance, then looked back down at her. “J-Just so you know,” Bdubs called down, “we were pressured into doing this-”

A third head appeared in her narrow field of view, on the other side of the pit. Cleo couldn’t see a face at all behind the helmet and the green visor, but she had known Xisuma long enough to tell that he had a smug look about him. She glared up at the three of them. “Oh, boys...” she lamented. “You don’t know what you’ve done...”

Cleo coughed as the withering reached her lungs. She swayed, fell back into the field of roses, and was gone.

\-----

Ah, yes - buried alive. Not so alive anymore, she corrected herself. Back to what she was meant to be. Or a similar form, at least; she didn’t  _ feel _ quite like a zombie again. She almost dozed off, in this cozy grave with no heartbeat to keep her awake any longer. She did need the rest. Before she could sleep, though, someone started digging her up.

Cleo opened one eye. “Do you mind?”

Grimdog stared down at her, taken a little aback. “Erm... right. Cleo. Sorry to disturb your  **eternal rest.** I expect it feels nice to be dead again, after so long in the world of the living.”

“You’re not wrong,” Cleo sighed, hoisting herself out of the grave. “Although I’m still not exactly back to where I want to be, am I? Different kind of undead and all that. Better than being alive, though.”

“Better than  **living, indeed,”** Grimdog replied. “By the way, you have some beautifully striking eyes, I must say.”

Cleo wrinkled her nose at him. “The fact that you’re commenting on my eyes right now means something weird happened, didn’t it? Spill.”

“Oh, you know me so well,” Grimdog teased. “They really are  **lovely,** though, in an  **eerie, glowing way.”**

“Ah, eerie and glowing. Perfect. Just what I look for in... eyes.”

Cleo looked around at the graveyard. She recognized it well. Joe had built it last year, and of course immediately shown it off to her with a comment about it being her home during the pirating off-season, speaking with such authority on the topic that, if Cleo hadn’t known him better than that, she might have even believed that pirating HAD an off-season. “There’s a lot more infrastructure here than I remember. You all have been busy.”

**“We sure have,”** Grimdog agreed proudly. **“Most of the building has been X and Cub, though.”**   
  


“X, right!” Cleo exclaimed. “I need to talk to him. I expect he’s not here right now, having just watched me die all the way out in New Hermitville. In the meantime, mind giving me a tour of the place?”

“I’d be delighted!” Grimdog offered his arm, which Cleo promptly hooked her own arm around. “So... what are your plans that require X’s  **expertise?”**

“I’ve got two demises in mind,” Cleo grinned. “Well, three, really. Two are for revenge, and one will take advantage of someone who I  _ happen _ to know has his guard down. I don’t think X would approve of the revenge kills, you know, but I need some redstone guidance, so I want to ask for his help with the third.”

Grimdog nodded. “Already making the best of things, that’s the Cleo I know. X has been pretty excited about  **murdering** lately, though, so I don’t know why he wouldn’t  **approve of two more deaths…”**

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 15 - Cleo was betrayed, and became the eleventh victim of Demise.


	12. Dead Man Laughing

_ "They danced around the pyre, chanting and laughing. And the man in the middle, burning on the pyre, laughed with them until his final breath." _

-

TFC was not the most social person in the world. He didn’t think of this as a bad thing; it was just the way he rolled. He usually preferred working on his own projects over getting involved in whatever silly fights and rivalries the younger hermits played at. Even when they were practically fighting just above his head, he just kept on digging and building.

He had no reason to sign the book for this new game. He hardly ever played the one-off minigames, much less any sort of group-wide  _ event. _ But for some reason, TFC was drawn to this one. He was determined to get in on it - even if it took him all day to get to New Hermitville and find the comparatively unassuming black board. Even though he wondered, as he was signing his name, why he wanted to do this in the first place. It was rules and a goal he could easily manage, sure, but it was still unlike him to buy into competitions.

His newly-crafted iron armor felt strange on him after many months of smooth, cool diamond. His best armor was tucked safely away in storage. There were plenty more rooms of Vault 6 to dig out and decorate. He was ready for the games to begin.

\-----

It was almost possible, down here, to forget that Demise was even happening. For some time, TFC continued about his business as if nothing were out of the ordinary. He read the chat from time to time, of course, and saw people losing the game one by one. He wondered at Ren’s constant taunts about “warmbloods”, and at why the dead team were calling themselves “the Greyskins”. But no one had bothered trying to trap him yet. Every few days, he methodically checked all his chests and iron doors, and sometimes the trees - anything that might be trapped - and never found anything. This didn’t stop him from continuing to check everything every time, though - one could never be too careful.

Eventually, someone started targeting TFC. He didn't know who, and he didn't really care. The zombies filling his mine had been easy enough to dispatch. And every pitfall so far had been calibrated just poorly enough to let TFC slip away each time. The traps started appearing around the time that the armor stand vault dwellers did, though, and TFC was more interested in those.

They were Cleo's doing, no doubt. TFC had been wondering who had been scuttling around his base lately, and here was the answer. He marveled at the animate puppets, especially the floating "Mr. Handy", the robot whose camera stalks followed his movement around the room. Then he checked the books in a chest, to see what Cleo wanted him to do with these guys.

_ "'...Green corpse starch...'" _ he read.  _ "'...used to make super soldiers.' _ Oookay. Well, that's probably going to kill someone." He chuckled at his own joke, then continued reading. Somewhere, out of sight, almost too quiet to hear, another, higher voice laughed with him.

The day after he assigned items to his vault dwellers, he checked back to find that the idle patterns Cleo had put them into had changed. So Cleo really was looking to play out a scene. TFC especially got a kick out of the vault dweller dancing "naked" in a bush, but couldn't help but notice that this room was echoing his laughter a bit more than it should. He experimented with continuing the scene in a different way, and went about his business.

\-----

"Oh, there it is!" TFC snatched his communicator off the kitchen table. It had gone missing the previous morning, easy to miss in his rabbit warren of a base. He pocketed the communicator without looking too closely at the messages, and headed to the courtyard to see if Cleo had changed anything more.

At first glance, everything seemed the same. The unclothed armor stand was still dancing; the cow-headed one was still in its corner; Mr. Handy still hovered in the same place and tracked his movements with its fake cameras. However, Gill, the fish-headed vault dweller and the recipient of the green starch, was conspicuously absent. 

TFC checked the main logbook. As was... somewhat expected... Gill had indeed been turned into a supermutant. So now it was time to play "find the armor-stand-sculpted monstrosity".

And find it he did, hulking in the carpeted intersection of a few hallways. It lurched at him, but didn’t seem to be able to move out of the spot it stood in, so TFC just inspected it from a distance with a grin. Looking around, he spotted another book on a lectern, probably with more narration on what to do next. He opened the book, not noticing the high-pitched giggle from another corner as he read the first two pages.

_ Page 3 _

_ And remember: The vaults were never designed to save anyone. _

A piston fired. The unsupported carpet ripped open beneath him. It took a moment for him to even react to the pit of lava he had been dropped into, but when he did... he started laughing. He hadn’t seen the death message, telling him who to avoid. It was a clever trap - Cleo deserved this kill.

TFC’s laugh turned into a cough, as the burning lava reached his lungs. But another presence laughed for him - laughed with him - even as TFC disappeared entirely from the vault.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 16 - TFC granted refuge to a friend, and became the twelfth victim of Demise.


	13. The Deadly Gamble

_ "He never refused a game. He gambled his life away." _

-

This was a terrible hiding spot. But it did give him a good view of the graveyard.

Zedaph had been coming here at any chance he got ever since Cleo’s Demise; everyone had heard the rumors, some from Cleo herself, and it sounded like she would be getting revenge very soon. It was a good time to try to catch the moment someone arrived at the graveyard. Unfortunately, Zedaph had just missed TFC’s demise a few days prior, but he was determined to catch  _ someone. _ So he was sitting in the graveyard, wearing his costume from the previous Halloween in the hopes of being a little more inconspicuous, but still feeling like he stuck out like a sore thumb.

His communicator went off at the same moment that the energy of the place shifted. He shot to his feet. This must be it! He could check his communicator to see who had just died, but he didn’t want to miss seeing them appear...

Grimdog showed up first, materializing from the shadows just outside his crypt. Zedaph, who had been hiding  _ behind _ the same crypt, scooted in the other direction. He watched as Grimdog walked over to one of the graves and started digging. Zedaph hadn’t hidden at an angle where he could read the headstones! Stupid!

It only took a few more moments for the newly Demised to be exhumed and climb free. The two Greyskins had a quick, murmured conversation that Zedaph couldn’t hear. Then Grimdog vanished, and the other - Keralis, as it turned out - moved to explore.

And immediately spotted Zedaph behind the crypt. Giant white saucer eyes bored into Zedaph’s own fairly normal ones. Blank white... like-

“Zedaph? Is that you? Mr. Game Show Man?” Keralis stepped closer. “What are you doing here? This place is supposed to only be for dead people, and people we maybe want to lure in to kill...”

“I-I-” Zedaph stammered. He had planned for being questioned, but Keralis finding him so fast caught him off guard. “I’m, uh... just curious! S-since I’m not playing along, you know, I can’t be turned grey, so I was just checking out what I was missing! Taking a look at the lifestyle - the  _ deathstyle -  _ of the average Greyskin!”

Keralis narrowed his eyes. “Just curious? Hmm...” A ghostly-looking iron sword materialized in Keralis’ left hand. He pointed it threateningly at Zedaph. “Curious? Or sneaky? Selling our secrets to the living, maybe?”

Zedaph backpedaled, holding his arms up in a futile defense. “Nnnno no no no no! I would never! Even though that is kind of a smart idea, apart from bringing the wrath of the dead down upon me for doing it. But I wouldn’t do that! I’m a, uh, a neutral party here! I-in fact, a couple weeks ago, I got killed in the name of Demise anyway, so really I’m practically an honorary dead guy myself! You can ask Grimdog - he got my head from that little encounter.”

Keralis paused, sword wavering, still pointed at Zedaph’s throat. Zedaph forced himself to stand still, to not run away like prey. Running away would probably get him stabbed. In the back of his mind, a surprised voice helpfully supplied,  **That’s a ven sword!**

_ Great! _ Zedaph replied sarcastically.  _ Does that make it more stabby or less stabby than a normal sword? _

After a few tense moments, the sword vanished. Keralis lowered his hand. “Okay, honorary dead guy. I can call Grimdog, and if you tell truth, he’ll know. And then he can talk to you about deathstyle here! I’m new, so I don’t know a lot yet.”

Zedaph relaxed ever so slightly. “I- I didn’t really want to... to talk to him just now,” he admitted. “I don’t really know what I’d say. I’m just kinda looking around for now. M-maybe later.”

Keralis kept his eyes narrowed. “If you insist.”

There was an awkward, suspicious silence, as neither knew whether the conversation was finished or not. “So...” Zedaph tried. “How did you demise, anyway? Did Cleo get you?”

Keralis shook his head. “No, no, but I’m sure she would have if that game hadn’t gotten me first.”

“Game? Were you playing minigames?” It didn’t sound too out of the ordinary for Keralis, but the hermits had generally been leaving the riskier minigames alone since Demise had begun.

“Well, it was more of a trap,” Keralis clarified. “Bumbo showed it to me! He said Tango built it for him, but he nimbly dodged it! So did I, but then I jumped back in. I couldn’t help myself! It was a game! I had to try.”

“Y-you said Tango built it?” Zedaph repeated, his throat tightening a bit at the thought.

“Yeah, that’s- oh no. What’s wrong?” Keralis frowned, then realized. “Ohh. You and Tango, you are very very close friends, right? And I think Tango’s mostly been here, so you maybe haven’t really seen him. You want to go looking? We could visit the Deadquarters together... I could drop you into one of the traps...”

“N-no, that’s- not right now,” Zedaph replied, wrapping his arms around himself. “I-I think I’ll just... leave for now. Or maybe talk to Grimdog, like you suggested. You go on and do... whatever you Greyskins do when you aren’t killing hermits.”

“We plan how to kill hermits,” Keralis said cheerfully. “Okay! I think I need to go home or go to one of the shops Sashwammy built to get a new elytra. Maybe I’ll see you here again!”

Zedaph waved as Keralis trotted away. He sighed and closed his eyes, ready to go home but not quite ready to make his feet move yet. 

“Oh, hey Zed,” someone said in a blaze of magic. “Fancy seeing you here.”

Zedaph’s eyes snapped open. He spun around, and gasped as he found himself face-to-terrifying-face with Cub.

“Hi! Yes! Fancy me being here! I was-” Zedaph’s heart, breath, and mind all raced at about a million miles an hour. Vexnos being nervous in the background was  _ not  _ helping. Oh no, this was  _ Cub _ he was talking to. Would Cub sense Vexnos’ presence? What would happen if they were found out? Maybe he could just pass it off as Vexnos getting new servants with the loss of their old ones, like they had wanted to do before-

"We don't get many visitors around here," Cub said, as pleasantly jovial as ever. "Not that we encourage them, exactly."

"...Uhhh." The pleasantries completely short-circuited any semblance of an excuse that Zedaph might have had. “...Yes.”

Cub’s hand twitched. “You should probably go,” he warned casually. He moved to load his crossbow. “This place is for the dead and the soon-to-be-dead only. And I’m thinking it might be fun to shoot you again...”

Zedaph scooted around Cub and started backing toward the portal, tripping on a pumpkin. “Riiiight, right! I should definitely go then. I was just leaving anyway.”

He turned around to watch his step down the stairs. He took a deep breath, letting the swirling dizziness wash over him. Just before he teleported, a glowing arrow thunked into the obsidian next to his head.

\-----

Zedaph practically fell out of the portal in his hurry to get out the other side. He pressed himself against the portal frame, hiding just in case Cub actually followed him through. When it became clear that he wouldn’t, Zedaph sank down right where he was with a sigh and closed his eyes.

_ Please tell me we got what we needed. _

**We don’t know the... human? We don’t know the** **_being_ ** **ye talked to as well as ye do. Were they acting differently from how ye normally see them? The difference was clear in our human.**

Zedaph wrinkled his nose.  _ Kind of? I don’t really chat with Keralis often either. He seemed pretty normal for the most part. Except he was definitely a lot more... stabby than False was. _

**Our... former servant was more violent than usual, as well. Although he did give ye warning this time, and then let ye escape. Maybe the magic we gave him still fights the other Vex.**

Zedaph didn’t know if it was intentional, but he had noticed that Vexnos often projected their feelings as well as their voice. Whenever they talked about Cub, they gave off an air of melancholy. Zedaph knew the feeling.

_ You really do like Cub and Scar, don’t you? This isn’t just a case of stolen property for you like you keep pretending it is. _

There was a long pause before Vexnos responded.  **Ye are a very perceptive human.**

Zedaph gave a sad smile.  _ I try. _

**Yes - our servants are more than that, to us. Companions, maybe. Perhaps even... friends. Though we do not know if they see us the same way.**

_ We’re working toward the exact same goal, really. Rescuing two close friends after they’ve been taken and... and twisted by that other Vex. The difference is, my two best friends aren’t the only people I know in this world. I know everyone here, now. That’s why I want to make sure we can take them all back. _

**Yes... all of them.** Vexnos “sounded” more determined than ever. Quickly, they got back to business.  **It would behoove us to enlist the help of one who is still wearing the dragon mask. They will feel and wield that magic more strongly than the one ye talked to before. The magic itself might be needed to push the rival’s game to our advantage.**

  
_ Right, then. _ Zedaph stood up and started walking back to the main tunnel network.  _ Talk to a living Dragon Bro. Got it. Man, hermits are dying left and right here! Who’s even left to talk to? _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 17 - Keralis tried to beat the odds, and became the thirteenth victim of Demise.


	14. Coming Back To Bite You

_ "He realized with horror that he was looking upon the face of the friend he had left behind. 'It's me,' he pleaded, stepping toward her. 'Don't you recognize me?' Without hesitation, the zombie lunged to attack." _

-

The first time he called them together, they welcomed him. The second time, he helped them survive. The third time, they helped him kill.

  
  
  


When Xisuma first called a meeting, to arrange a seemingly unrelated plan for IDEA, he seemed almost embarrassed at their stares. “Yeah... I died.”

“What happened?” Bdubs asked curiously. It had only been a couple of days since the message had gone out in chat, a few more since all three had seen Ren appear ominously in their store.

“I was lured into a trap.” Xisuma’s voice turned bitter. “I put my trust in another hermit, and they  _ betrayed _ me.” He took a step toward them, awkward, almost shambling. Was it the odd angle that made his eyes seem to disappear from view? “That’s what the dead team do. They betray their fellow hermits...” 

Another step. Bdubs saw Keralis raise his trident as both of them backed away.

Xisuma stopped. He cocked his head slightly to one side. His face was visible again, or as much of it as could ever be seen. “I would never come after either of you, though. Anyway, what could I possibly do to you right now?”

“R-redstone!” Bdubs accused. “You're a redstone guy. You could have this whole place rigged!”

“I’m not going to do you like Ren did me.” Bdubs could hear a hint of a smile in Xisuma’s voice, but couldn’t see it - the smile never reached his eyes. “You just gotta have a little bit of faith in me.”

Keralis poked his trident at Xisuma's chest, keeping him at a distance. “He can’t be trusted.”

Bdubs looked between the two, unsure. Then he made up his mind. He forced a smile and put a hand on Xisuma’s shoulder, suppressing a shiver at the cold, unfeeling armor. “Come on, give it a break. He’s our friend!”

And so it went. The rest of the meeting went normally, if cautiously. Bdubs’ plan that he had proposed at the last meeting was put into action, and the three went their separate ways.

  
  
  


In the second meeting, Bdubs was the one suspicious of Xisuma. Sure, Xisuma had brought plenty of totems of undying for the two of them, promising a never-ending supply. But he had also seemed a little too eager to take out his sword and “demonstrate” how the totems worked. And why had they met in front of the Demise board this time?

Maybe Bdubs was hesitant because their target for their buyout plan today was Sahara, and Bdubs, dragon head firmly bound over his own, now had a vested interest in playing nice around the Architechs. Or it could have something to do with Xisuma casually knowing and pointing out the secret entrance to the dragon bro hideout. But, apart from Keralis losing his trident in the redstone behemoth, this outing turned out as uneventful as the first.

  
  
  


The third meeting was in the newly-decorated meeting room. It looked beautiful.

“I’ve been pulling my weight here,” Xisuma declared, “supplying you with totems and whatnot... and now I need you two to return the favor.”

Bdubs and Keralis shared a look. This wasn’t what they had agreed upon. “Return the favor?” Bdubs asked.

“We need to start demising some living souls.”

“We?” Keralis echoed nervously.

“You do!” Bdubs feigned ignorance, purposely pretending he  _ didn’t hear  _ what Xisuma was implying, trying to ease the growing tension with humor. “You’ve been slacking!”

Xisuma’s head snapped in Bdubs’ direction. There was that empty visor again. He would chalk it up to reflections again, except he could clearly see none. No details but for the crack in the glass, void behind it.  _ “I’ve _ been slacking??”

“Yeah,” Bdubs stammered, backpedaling a bit. “I-I mean, Cub’s been killing a lot of people-”

Xisuma drew his sword. Bdubs scrambled out of his chair and backed into a corner as Xisuma jumped onto the table and stalked toward him. “And who killed Cub??” Xisuma reminded him, brandishing the sword. “Who killed Cub??”

He stopped, sword pointed directly at Bdubs’ chest. Bdubs pressed himself further against the wall. Seconds dragged by like hours. Then Bdubs blinked, and he could see Xisuma’s face again. Xisuma lowered his sword. “Well, it was a skeleton. But I’m the one who told it to.”

Xisuma sheathed his sword and continued the meeting as if nothing had happened. Bdubs cautiously returned to his seat.

The request was simple: Pick one of the still-living hermits. Take them on a tour of IDEA. At the end, let them walk ahead, exit through the gift shop, and over the edge...

“Ohhh,” Bdubs whimpered as he watched her fall. He shared a nervous, guilty look with Keralis. “Oh, gosh.”

The death message sent. Bdubs shuddered. Xisuma stepped out of his hiding place and started a slow clap. “Good job, boys.”

\-----

So yes, Bdubs was feeling guilty. He was also scared of what might happen to him now that he was responsible for someone’s Demise, but mostly he just felt bad about Cleo.

A chill breeze washed across him as he paced the grounds of his castle. He couldn’t let somebody not like him. People had to love him. He wanted to please, loved being part of groups of friends. It was why he minded the dragon head so little - it felt like he was part of something cool.

He made up his mind. He would invite Cleo over to detail his armory. Let her work her armor stand magic, maybe even write a story or two for the memorials and lecterns. It could be a room of honor for fallen heroes. And of course, she could be honored in it too.

Something Cleo had said in IDEA, right before she fell, echoed in his mind. “Never trust a dead person. Trust me, I know.”

It would be fine. Bdubs was a charmer. He could talk his way back into Cleo’s good graces. Right?

\-----

“By the way, let me just tell you, you are the nicest person in the world.”

“...What do you want?”

The rest of the conversation went about as well. Bdubs explained his idea and Cleo, somewhat surprisingly, agreed. “So I’m moving these stands to be an honorable display,” she clarified. “And I also get to write my own eulogy - which you should probably read, by the way, because it’ll mention you by name.”

Bdubs had a bad feeling about the way Cleo said that. He couldn’t put his finger on why, exactly, but something was wrong here. He turned up the charm further.

As Cleo left to prepare, she turned back toward Bdubs. “You’re putting a lot of trust in me, you realize that?”

Bdubs nodded emphatically, the motion exaggerated to a comical level by the long dragon snout. “I know! It’s because you trusted me, and I betrayed that, and I want to regain that trust.”

“Well, okay,” Cleo conceded. “If you’re showing me this trust, we’ll... call it even.”

With that, they parted ways, and Bdubs went back to work, confident in his successful schmoozing.

Cleo did her work that night, while Bdubs slept soundly in another part of the castle. When he woke up, Bdubs immediately felt a brief, overwhelming sense that Cleo had  _ done _ something - put a trap somewhere, maybe, or left the gate open to monsters, or... it was silly, of course. He was complimenting her the whole time they talked yesterday. She wouldn’t hurt him. Nevertheless, he put all his valuable tools safely in a chest before he went downstairs to check on the memorial room.

Everything seemed normal. A few blocks were out of place for some reason, but he knew that despite his best efforts, mobs sometimes found their way in. Accidents could happen. Bdubs admired the posing armor stands - a simple task for Cleo, to be sure, but they all looked very nice in their places.

Bdubs’ feet crunched on the gravel floor as he opened the book in which Cleo had written her eulogy. From the first page, she wrote of treachery and betrayal.

He turned the page. Before he got the chance to read it, he was falling.

Bdubs scrambled to his feet on the now-loose gravel, trying desperately to find the bucket of water he kept on him to stave off the lava pouring down from above. But it was too late.

He never should have trusted her.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 20th - Bdubs invited the enemy in, and became the fourteenth victim of Demise.


	15. Hounded

_ “He ran and ran and ran. But the relentless spirit hounded him every step of the way.” _

-

When everyone first arrived in this world, Joe had told himself that he would be a bit of a nomad this time: building structures here and there, but not staying in any one place for long. He could never have known, back then, how important his unusual lifestyle would become.

All things considered, Joe was one of the most diligent in preparing for Demise. He spent many hours gathering supplies and scraping together the diamonds for admission and a few totems. He made sure he always carried a half dozen or more useful potions. The armor he picked out and wore for the event was better than any armor he had worn all year. And he had a plan.

Long before anyone had even lost, Joe prepared for all sorts of devious tricks and traps. Before anyone could know about the curse of the Greyskins, Joe would freely admit that, while he was a part of this game, he feared death. Before the first demise, Joe was planning the first few locations he would hide in as he leaned fully into his wandering ways.

For the first few weeks, everything went basically according to plan. He built a blast-proof base inside the Statue of Hermity. He made a brief stop at the Ministry Of Truth to stock up on potions before leaving it behind. Once a few hermits had demised, particularly Cub, Joe left the main areas entirely, traveling between some abandoned bases of his own and the occasional defunct farm or starter base of hermits who had left the world. Still, he couldn’t get over the feeling that, somehow, he was being followed.

\-----

Even from a hole in a snowy mountain next to an unused ice farm, Joe had heard about people making devilish deals with “Grimdog” in exchange for their safety. He had no intention of locking himself into such a path. But he also never expected Grimdog to offer a deal to  _ him. _

Grimdog gave Joe a location to meet. Joe knew the place - after all, he’d built it.

Joe climbed down the ladder that he had definitely not installed in that crypt, all too aware that his back was to the open room below. He couldn’t tell that anyone was in the crypt with him, but when he turned around, Grimdog was there. Silent. Holding death masks of Cub and Scar, the most prestigious and most recent victims of the “game”, and watching Joe.

“Howdy, Grimdog,” Joe finally greeted, projecting an air of confidence that he really didn’t feel. “Tell me, why have you summoned the man who will conquer Death?”

**“Bold words,”** Grimdog chided,  **“for a warmblood standing in the depths of a crypt.”**

"One must be bold,” Joe declared, “to face the underlining,  _ underlying, _ arbiter of life and death in his own home."

Grimdog smiled.  **“Indeed. As for it being** **_my_ ** **home... that is why I’ve called you here.”**

“Ohh,” Joe thought he understood. “Since I built the graveyard last year, and you’re now living here, then  _ technically _ that means you’re trespassing on my land.”

**“Well,** yes.” Grimdog sounded sheepish. “Exactly. **For this I apologize! And I was wanting to get your... permission, to live here in the graveyard.”**

"Well, you know, I'm a big fan of abandoned structures being open to any who might need them - living or dead,” Joe explained. “And exhuming remains and forcing them to be relocated, that's its own historical and ethical nightmare. So I think you should be allowed to stay here!"

**“Alright.”** Grimdog put away the heads he had been carrying and rubbed his hands together. Then he produced a paper and quill from somewhere, handing them to Joe.  **“I’ve drafted a contract for this exact moment, if you please.”**

Joe took the contract and read it over.

_ “Grimdog, Lord of the Crypt, agrees not to target JoeHills in the game of demise while his blood runs warm. _

_ JoeHills agrees to allow Grimdog to live rent free in the Crypts of the JoeHills Graveyard.” _

That was it. Two sentences. No fine print, and no ambiguous statements that Joe could find - and he considered himself quite good at ambiguous statements. “On the whole, this looks solid to me,” he decided. Grimdog had already signed the bottom of the page; Joe added his signature with a flourish and handed the paper back. This wouldn’t solve all his Demise problems, of course - it wouldn’t even solve the main one, in Joe’s eyes. But one fewer Greyskin targeting his person couldn’t be a bad thing.

As Joe backed toward the ladder, he noticed Grimdog once again go still, simply... watching. Or maybe sleeping - it was hard to tell, with the sunglasses. “...Ren?” Joe asked tentatively, not sure how to address this. “Are... are you okay?”

Grimdog grinned and returned to holding - showing off - the heads of the recently Demised.  **“I’m just fine, thank you.”**

Joe left the crypt perturbed, followed by the echoes of Grimdog’s laughter.

\-----

Grimdog’s was not the only laugh to follow Joe on his journey. Joe was sure he heard Vex laughter punctuating some of his attempts at hidden camps. More specifically, it usually sounded suspiciously like Cub. Cub also spoke to Joe, sometimes, especially as Joe’s travels grew longer and longer. Mostly it was taunts in chat, leading Joe to wonder how close his pursuer really was. Sometimes it was whispers in his ear. However much Joe chose to tell himself that he was hiding, he knew the truth: he was running.

Nonetheless, Joe actually grew less paranoid as the days went by. He was used to the sounds in his ear, the messages in chat. None of Cub’s threats had yet been carried out. Joe was beginning to think they were rather empty.

One day, in a burst of confidence, Joe actually returned to the populated center, and marched straight into ConCorp to make a silly, and hopefully obnoxious, prank build right in the middle of the compound. As he built, he felt watched by a different entity - one that maybe wasn’t fully on the side of good, but didn’t seem as malicious as the Greyskins. Halfway into his towering cone build, Joe looked around, and spotted a sculpted face on a cliff, peeking between buildings. Maybe that was his current observer.

Two thirds of the way into the build, Joe felt something - a thought from the mysterious other entity - that could only be described as “!”. He ducked behind the edge of his build just as Cub exited the portal.  _ Stupid! _ Why was he here? Shouldn’t he be terrorizing one of the other living hermits right now?

Cub turned a slow circle, admiring Joe’s rough orange build. He walked straight through the side of it, then turned and looked up.  **I see you...**

And then he flew away, leaving Joe to puzzle over the encounter and wonder how bad of an idea it would be to finish building his traffic cone.

\-----

After many days of travel, Joe - along with a dog he had befriended on the way - came upon a mountain riddled with caves. His elytra was in desperate need of repair, so, against his better judgement, Joe forged into the darkness, looking for a fight, pointedly ignoring the faintly echoing laughter that he heard whenever he took risks.

The caves turned out to be more expansive than Joe expected, leading him up, down, around, and under the mountain. So complex was the network of tunnels that Joe almost relaxed, despite the monster-ridden ravine perched above a river of lava. It would be hard for someone to find him down here, even if that someone could move through walls. Besides, he needed to risk settling for a while soon - he had seeds, but was low on food, and couldn’t risk stealing from the wheat patch neighboring the Greyskins’ home again.

\-----

Joe sang to himself as he worked, building a little home from which he would be able to look out over the caves. “Who’s the guy who can conquer death? That’s Joe Hills! He-” Joe paused, listening.

**You can’t run forever, Joe...**

“Why run, when I can split?” Joe replied to the empty air, barely pausing. “I’m happily toiling away at a tower with a lovely ravine-side view and you haven’t pushed me off yet, so I’m inclined to think your threats are as empty as your heart.”

There was no reply. Joe listened for a moment longer, then continued humming and building. A chicken clucked from the other side of the ravine. He smiled at it. With his limited admin magic, he could see a name floating above its head, the same name as was written on the nametag around its neck - and the same name that any other admin would see floating above  _ his _ head. With any luck, that could briefly throw Cub off his scent, if he needed it to.

\-----

Joe was in the Nether again, heading back to the central hub. He needed supplies that he couldn’t easily get in his caves - things like rockets for his elytra, which he would need to rescue his dog, which Cub had stolen. Checking both ways for danger, Joe started trotting in the direction he hoped was hubward.

He slammed to a halt as soon as the top level of the hub came into view. Cub was there. He was  _ right there. _ Standing at the ice-boat station, TNT in one hand, wings loosely folded on his back. Staring  _ right at Joe. _

Even as Joe nervously crept closer, Cub didn’t move. Was he afk? Usually one could tell an afk player by their relaxed stance and a vacant look in their eyes, but Cub’s eyes were now a flat, glowing white, his face impossible to read. Joe just had to hope Cub really was afk, and couldn’t see Joe as he tiptoed by.

Somehow, Joe made it to the shopping district without incident. He ducked into the rocket shop, aware that it was handled by possibly the second most dangerous Greyskin, bought rockets, and turned to leave.

Cub was standing on one of the lamps just outside the doorway. “Hey there, Joe,” he said, perfectly casual.

Joe jumped and scrambled to get away. Cub chuckled, but did not follow.

\-----

Joe found himself singing again as he checked lectern after lectern, scattered around his cave system. None of them seemed to be trapped, but just in case, Joe had taken the books and used ender pearls to get a safe distance away before checking each one. It was a puzzle that allegedly would reunite him with his dog.

The last lectern was on a mountain. The snow definitely hid a trap. After snatching the book and running again, Joe realized that this lectern, as he’d imagined, definitely WAS trapped, and his quick and careful approach had prevented the trap from going off. Of course, he triggered it from a safe distance anyway, just to see what it  _ would _ have done, if the Greyskins had been clever enough to catch him.

But, the Greyskins were so confident that he would die to that, that this book led him no closer to his beloved pup. Joe deduced that they would have given the dog back once he had Demised and joined them, so to the Deadquarters swamp he went. As he flew in widening circles, he sang louder about how he would conquer death forever.

Maybe he was getting a bit punchy. Sleeping in caves in constant fear for one’s life was not exactly restful. But he did get his dog back.

“Did you see that, Cub?” he yelled to the empty sky. “I rescued the dog AND I didn’t die!”

For a few minutes, there was no response, as Joe and his dog returned to the cavern complex hideout. But as Joe went back underground, his pup following loyally behind, he heard Cub’s magic-distorted voice echo:

**How... unfortunate. Fine. Well played... this time.**

\-----

Two days later, a new lectern appeared. On it was a personal invitation - to the Deadquarters.

He would barely admit it to himself, but Joe was tired. He’d been living on the run for weeks, and had barely slept. But he couldn’t turn down a personal invitation into one’s home - that would be rude of him.

After a few stumbles, he finally launched into the air. Why did this place have to be wings-only, anyway? Joe circled, dove in the entrance, and tried to land on a makeshift bridge across the lava trap just inside. But his aim was off, his foot slipped, and suddenly he was in the lava. He scrambled his way out, but not quickly enough to avoid his totem of undying exploding in his face. Not off to a great start.

There was a puzzle on this floor, which occupied Joe’s brain even further as he explored, pressed buttons, and solved it. On the next floor, another puzzle. To the left were two obvious tripwire hooks. He didn’t notice that there was no string connecting them, and ender pearled to the other side, to be safe. If there was a trap, maybe that meant there was a clue.

A door across the room caught his attention. “Room of Dark Secrets of the Dead”. That sounded promising. Joe walked across the pressure plate that opened the door, and unthinkingly hopped down onto the lowered block on the other side.

The block vanished into the wall. With barely time to make a sound, Joe dropped into a deep pit of lava, designed to be inescapable by even the craftiest intruder. Somewhere, through the sizzling pain, he heard a familiar laugh nearby.

Joe could have been the man who conquered death, but hubris stole his final breath.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 21 - Joe thought he could outrun Death, and became the fifteenth victim of Demise.


	16. Inseparable Brothers

_ "They were bound so that they could never leave each other’s side, even when one brother met his end." _

_ - _

“It’s like a-” Mumbo screeched to a halt just before jumping into the End portal. “...I suddenly got nervous.”

“Me too,” Iskall agreed. The portal could easily be trapped. It was a set location, so it could get anyone. But... "I went through just the other day, and it was fine," Iskall tried to reassure him. "Here, I'll even go first." They flipped a switch on their communicator and opened a private voice line with Mumbo. "Just in case, right?" The call made Iskall's voice feedback strangely, audible both in person and through Mumbo's communicator. 

Iskall jumped through the portal, near-seamlessly arriving in the End. Immediately, they heard TNT being lit. They panicked, hand instinctively flying to an emergency button on their eyepiece, just barely accessible around the stupid dragon head. "Mumbo, stay out-" they warned. The moment they pressed the button, the call cut off. For a few moments, Iskall was invisible, untouchable. Safe.

Mumbo was not. Iskall watched in horror as Mumbo popped into existence on the obsidian platform despite the warnings. By instinct, Iskall tried to call out to him, but their voice didn’t work in this state either. Mumbo’s eyes widened when he realized what was happening. With nowhere else to go, he flung himself between two lit TNT and off the edge into the void.

Iskall closed their eyes as the TNT exploded around and through them. Over the sound of explosions, they could just hear the crack of a totem of undying.

The timer on the escape program ran out. Iskall flickered back into existence. “Mumbo??” They looked around frantically. “No, no, no-”

A dark shape, barely visible against the Void, shot into view on silver elytra wings. He banked around, landing near the edge of the island, and looked back toward Iskall in shock. The voice call started up again. “Dude!!” Mumbo gasped. “I survived!”

Iskall jumped the newly-made gap between the entry platform and pathway, and scrambled up to meet Mumbo. “You did! How did you do it??”

“I could ask you the same thing, dude,” Mumbo laughed, still giddy from the adrenaline and regeneration effect. “I think my totem saved me - I felt that explosion hit me  _ hard,  _ and I definitely blacked out for a second like I’d died. But you, man, did you just vanish? Or jump off before I got there, or what?”

Iskall tapped their eyepiece and grinned. “Cyborg powers, dude. I’ve got this program that basically lets me disappear. I can’t touch anything, nothing can touch me. I set that off and rode out the explosions that way.”

“That is wicked,” Mumbo marveled as the two walked across the island to an open gateway. “I would use that  _ all _ the time.”

“It’s useful,” Iskall agreed, “but it’s not as fun as you think it is. I can’t talk, can’t touch anything, can’t even really move from one spot. And if I stay that way too long it starts not feeling great. Humans aren’t really supposed to be able to just disappear like that.”

As they reached the staircase to the gateway, Mumbo took the lead. “You went first through the portal, I’ll go first here. Ready?”

Iskall nodded. “Yep.”

Mumbo tossed an ender pearl into the gateway. “Let’s g-”

The second he teleported, his voice in the call was cut off by a sharp sound, then static. At the same moment, a chat message appeared in the corner of Iskall’s vision.

**MumboJumbo blew up**

<Grian> OH!

Iskall, who had been ready to throw their own pearl, gasped and backed away from the gateway, nearly falling down the steps. They were shaking so badly they could barely navigate safely to the ground. As soon as the static cleared from their ears, Iskall cried, “Mumbo? What happened??”

It was a few seconds before Mumbo had recovered enough to reply, seconds that felt like much longer. Finally, his voice crackled through the voice link: “They trapped the little ones as well, dude! They trapped the little ones as well!”

\-----

Iskall leaned against one of the obsidian pillars, eyes closed, still shaking like a leaf. They sat down and tried to calm their breathing. Public chat was going wild, so they dismissed it, but after a few moments, a private message came in, from possibly the last hermit Iskall would expect.

<Zedaph> -> <iskall85> Iskall don’t die

<Zedaph> -> <iskall85> where are you

<Zedaph> -> <iskall85> whatever you do, don’t die in the next hour or so

Iskall frowned, letting out a confused chuckle. They opened their eyes and pulled up their communicator’s keyboard to respond.

<iskall85> -> <Zedaph> not planning on it lol?

<iskall85> -> <Zedaph> i’m in the end 

<iskall85> -> <Zedaph> main island

<iskall85> -> <Zedaph> -14 53

<Zedaph> -> <iskall85> do not move

<Zedaph> -> <iskall85> I’m coming to you

<iskall85> -> <Zedaph> ok lol

More than a little bemused, Iskall got comfortable, closed their eyes again, and waited for Zedaph to arrive. Why would Zedaph, of all people, want to see them? The messages sounded more serious than Iskall had ever seen him. And Zedaph specifically wanted to talk before Iskall Demised, it seemed. Zedaph wasn’t part of Demise, as far as Iskall knew. What did he care?

Iskall heard their name being called. They made sure to look straight down before opening their eyes, then carefully looked around, walking around the pillar to be more visible. They waved when they saw Zedaph, who responded by quickening his pace toward Iskall.

“Iskall!” Zedaph called excitedly, puffing for breath. “Man, I’m so glad I found you. You saw chat, right? Mumbo’s Demise?”

“Not just chat,” Iskall replied. “We were going to go Endbusting and, well...”

“Oh,” Zedaph realized. “Oh dear. Well, at least the trap that got him didn’t get both of you, right?”

Iskall nodded. “Why were you so eager to come talk to me, anyway?”

“Because you’re now the last living Dragon Bro,” Zedaph said, as if that would explain everything.

Iskall blinked. Of all the answers they might have expected- “Why are you so interested in the Dragon Bros?” they laughed.

“Well,” Zedaph answered gravely, “the Dragon Bros might be the key to breaking the Demise curse.”

There might as well have been blazing white question marks above Iskall’s head. “I, uh... I don’t follow.”

“You’ve got the Binding on that head, right,” Zed explained, “but there’s more magic on it than just that. I don’t know what it is or who put it there but it’s actually blocking Demise Guy from reaching you all quite as well.”

“Oh, Stress did tell me something about putting magic on it, I think,” Iskall recalled. “...Who’s Demise Guy?”

“The magic is from Stress?” Zedaph exclaimed. “Oh, that explains a lot actually. It’s too bad we can’t really talk to her directly about it though, since she’s, well-”

“Frozen in an iceberg to magic herself back to life, yeah,” Iskall finished. “That does make it hard. And she specifically told me we shouldn’t wake her unless something went really wrong. You still haven’t told me who ‘Demise Guy’ is?”

“If she can use her magic to undemise herself, then there’s some merit to our theory,” Zedaph mused. “Oh! Demise Guy! Demise Guy is the Vex who’s causing people to turn grey and controlling everyone who dies.”

Iskall felt like they were about four steps behind in a conversation that had only taken three steps forward. “The Vex??”

“Yeah-” Zedaph stopped suddenly and frowned, listening to something. He shook his head, mouthing something in response. More listening. His frown deepened. He shook his head again. Finally, he sighed, stood still for a few moments more, then returned his focus to Iskall. “Okay. So I apparently am not explaining this well enough for  _ some people. _ Namely, the OTHER Vex, who’s on our side, kind of, and who I was chatting to just now, and who is getting impatient with us. They want to talk to you directly for a sec, to explain things themselves and also hopefully prove that I'm not spouting my usual nonsense. This’ll get weird.”

Iskall couldn’t see how this conversation could get any weirder. “Okay...”

Zedaph shivered, coughed, then stared directly at Iskall with eyes that were a lot  _ bluer _ than they were a moment ago.

**“Ye are the key,”** he - they - said, Zedaph’s voice being distorted to a higher pitch and echoed by another, equally high voice. 

Iskall jumped, eyes big as moons, ready to pull their sword on the intruder. “H-hallo?”

**“Ye bear a special mask,”** Vex!Zedaph continued.  **“We use masks to bestow magic, but so too can other magic masks block us. Our rival has laid claim to most everyone here, under the disguise of a simple game. But ye, and the others that wore the mask of the dragon, have been able to throw off some of their influence. Not all, as ye have seen, but enough to make a difference. We are the Vex whom your friends served before this Contract, and we wish to use your magic to free our- the rest of the people in this world. A Contract is difficult to break, but the Vex responsible has technically laid no claim to the winner, nor full claim to anyone before a winner is declared, so through that crack, with the magic your friend bestowed upon your mask, we can break it.”**

As the Vex talked, Iskall had been unconsciously backing up, until their back hit a pillar. Zedaph blinked, his eyes fading back to indigo, and sat down hard. He wrapped his arms around himself, still shivering. “N-n-never again” he shuddered. “Y-you hear? Don’t do that!”

Iskall slid down the pillar to sit across from Zedaph. The two of them sat in silence for a moment, Iskall still trying to process what had just happened. “You... you good now?” they finally asked.

Zedaph took a deep breath, forcing the shivering to stop. "Vex magic is cold, did you know that? It's freezing cold! I don't know how they stand it."

"How did you, of all people, get mixed up with the Vex?" Iskall wondered. "You never do magic at all, that I know of."

"It's a partnership of necessity," Zedaph sighed. "I turned down the actual magic part. I'm supposed to just be their eyes and ears, really. We both have a vested interest in getting the hermits back to normal, so here we are, figuring it out."

"And the dragon heads - Stress's magic - is the solution?"

"Best we can figure, yeah."

"How do I do that?"

"No idea."

Iskall gave Zedaph a look.

Zedaph raised his hands defensively. "Hey, don't look at  _ me _ like that! Even Stress doesn't know how her magic works sometimes, and neither of us ever even use magic most of the time!"

“You’re the one who’s been snooping around about this the past month!”

“Well, it’s a little hard to get information when it turns out the only person who knows anything about the not-Vex side of things is  _ frozen in an iceberg.” _

Iskall held up their hands. “Okay, okay. Let’s figure this out together, then. ...You, me, and the Vex.”

“Great!” Zedaph clapped. “First off, we’re already in the End, which might help since this is sort of location-based magic, right? Dragon head, dragon’s home! Now, uh... I guess maybe talk to the great Mother Dragon or something?”

Iskall glared at him. “I am  _ not _ summoning an ender dragon during Demise. Even if I did have the crystals for it-”

“Crystals!” Zedaph interrupted. “End crystals heal the dragon. We need to heal the hermits. What if we got out an End crystal and, uh... went from there?”

\-----

“I don’t think this is safe, Zed.”

Iskall and Zedaph had left the End, to regroup on top of the replica obsidian pillar outside New Hermitville. They stood uncomfortably close to the End crystal floating innocently in the middle.

“You can touch End crystals without them going off,” Zedaph reminded them. “It’s just sudden impacts that make them go boom.”

“That makes me feel so much better.” Iskall gripped their totem of undying tighter in their left hand and scooted closer. “It’s just one explosion,” they told themself. “Even if it blows up, it’s one explosion, the totem will keep me alive...”

Iskall pushed through the crystal’s aura to reach out and touch it. They felt the charge of its barely-contained energy, but it didn’t explode under their fingertips. It just kept softly bobbing up and down as if nothing was disturbing it.

Zedaph put his hand on Iskall’s shoulder. “Ready?”

“No.”

“Excellent. Neither am I. Let’s do this.”

Iskall squeezed their eyes shut. They felt a bit silly, standing here  _ wishing _ for their friends to be back to normal, but it was the only idea either of the hermits had, and it wasn’t like anyone was around to see them.

Zedaph’s grip tightened as he started shivering. All at once, Iskall felt a rush of magic - or rather, two, maybe even three magics at once, meeting within them, amplifying each other, and radiating outward across the world.

As quickly as it started, it was done. Zedaph hastily pulled away. Iskall hesitantly lifted their hand from the End crystal, afraid that breaking the connection might be enough for it. When they were sure that the crystal would continue spinning placidly, Iskall took two hurried steps back. They jumped off the pillar and glided to the ground, Zedaph clumsily following. As soon as both were safe, Iskall produced a blanket that they had grabbed earlier and draped it around Zedaph’s shoulders.

“Well, I don’t know if it was because I was being a conduit instead of an actual mage or if the magic is just like that, but that  _ sucked,” _ Zedaph declared. “I hope that worked. I wouldn’t be upset if I never had to do anything with Vex ever again.”

He stared into space for a moment, then refocused on Iskall. “Good. They say they’re pretty sure everything went to plan. It’s impossible to say until there’s an actual winner, though.”

“I wonder if I could just... intentionally off myself to end the game?” Iskall suggested.

Zedaph shook his head. “First off, there’s no guarantee that what we just did actually worked. Secondly, in order to really break this once and for all... you might need to win.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 23 - Mumbo met his End, and became the sixteenth victim of Demise.


	17. Patient Zero

_ "The doctor could aid as many people as he had hours in the day, but he could not save himself." _

-

_ Warning: unknown error occurred. Restart required. _

Doc growled in annoyance, switched his building blocks to his left hand, and accepted the restart. His vision flattened and tinted slightly green, and his right arm became dead weight, but Doc just kept doggedly building away as his cybernetics rebooted for the billionth time. Something was seriously messing with his circuits, and the only explanation he could figure was that it somehow had to do with Demise.

He hoped that he wouldn’t have to respawn to fix the problem. He was planning on winning.

He had even made a deal with Grimdog himself, back when things were first heating up. Four hermits had demised, and the Greyskin curse was only just starting to be discovered by the still-living. Doc had heard rumors that Ren was the self-proclaimed leader of the dead, and so he had gone to visit the crypts and bargain for his life.

Everyone was used to Ren’s variety of characters - though still no one was quite sure if they were separate entities or just good acting - but seeing and hearing Grimdog still came as a shock. Doc hadn't been quite sure how to talk to this version of Ren. Grimdog no longer cared about the winnings... he just wanted to see each and every hermit dead. Eventually, they came to an agreement: Doc, though he was still on the living team, would trap and demise a hermit, as a sacrifice to Grimdog. In return, Grimdog and all Greyskins under his command would never specifically target Doc. It was a simple contract, and far from perfect: Doc, of course, would still have to be wary of the general traps laid in public spaces... and, he had soon realized, the hermit he demised did not necessarily have to be part of the “game” in the first place.

\-----

Doc was picking up the items scattered around the anvil when his communicator made a sound indicating that someone wanted to voice chat. He checked the name, chuckled, and accepted the call.

"Dude!!" came Zedaph's indignant voice.

"Sorry, man," Doc replied innocently. "Workplace accident, right? Walking around a construction zone without a hard hat..."

"Oh, yeah, I'm sure," Zedaph replied. "Even if it were, I don't think a hard hat would have done much to protect me, would it? What was the actual reason you lured me into a death trap?"

Doc sighed. "I made a deal… I needed a hermit soul."

"Well, I do have a hermit soul. Or I HAD one, before you hit it out of me with an ANVIL," Zedaph joked.

"Yeah, but you can respawn normally," Doc protested. "You won't turn into some weird grey zombie just because I want to save my own skin."

"That's true," Zedaph huffed. "You could have  _ asked _ though, you know. I would have been happy to provide. I don't like this situation any more than you do."

\-----

Soon after that, Doc had also made a deal with a demised Cub in exchange for some much-needed materials. Cub had learned from Grimdog’s mistake, and had specified the hermits that counted for the task he set. But, fortunately for Doc’s conscience, the trap that Cub had tried to lead them into had already been triggered, so no one actually fell to the curse due to Doc’s actions.

Even the Greyskins couldn’t help Doc with his twitchy redstone, though. It had been acting up ever since the beginning of the event, and never gave any clues as to what was actually wrong. Each reboot helped a little, but it wasn’t long before things started acting up again. Doc did his best to just grit his teeth and deal with it until the “game” was done.

\-----

_ Warning: unknown error occurred. Full system restart required. _

Doc raised his hands in frustration. The problems were getting worse, and he still didn’t know why. A full system restart would leave him completely incapacitated for a while, as even the mainboard connecting his cybernetics to his brain needed to shut down. He was standing in the middle of an open field, but his systems would not be denied. So, before accepting the restart, Doc sat down and activated the emergency defense mode. At least nothing would be able to see or touch him while he was vulnerable on the ground.

As the world flickered around him, and he flickered out of normal existence, he didn’t even notice the grey figure flitting around high above.

While his cybernetics ran diagnostic after diagnostic, booted and shut down and booted again, Doc faded in and out of uncomfortable consciousness. In one moment, he noticed it had grown dark around him. In the next, he realized that he had been surrounded in an obsidian box. In the next moment, it was no longer dark.

Doc’s senses faded for a longer time, after that. His semi-conscious mind realized that a Greyskin had discovered him - despite the fact that the mechanisms that put him into this state also made him invisible - and trapped him in obsidian, and lava that wouldn’t burn until Doc returned from this in-between state of being. He occupied his mind by imagining the box. He remembered the potion of fire resistance he kept on him, and imagined how long it would take to access the potion and drink it. He could do it. There would be plenty of time, and once the potion took effect, he could easily clear away the lava and break free. As soon as he woke up, he would grab it...

As soon as he woke up, his world exploded.

The defense protocol, having already been active much longer than it should have been, shut off as soon as the cybernetics properly rebooted. Before Doc could fully recover or reorient himself, there was a single sound, and he was waking up for a second time, in the bed he had been using under his build.

His body hadn’t even had time to register the danger or give him an adrenaline boost. He was just baffled, disoriented, still figuring out what had just happened. Doc looked around, spotting the obsidian box.  _ Now _ his heart was starting to speed up, as he saw the damaged ground around the bottom of the box.

They switched the trap.

They  _ switched the trap _ while he was unconscious.

Did they know? Did they realize that he had seen the first version, with the lava? Or was it just luck?

Either way, they got him. Doc was dead. Demised. Furious, he pounded both fists against the obsidian walls.

That’s when he noticed that, while his artificial right arm had of course been silver for years, his biological left arm was still as bright green as ever.

Doc realized that, with his Demise, the “game” had ended. It had just been him and Iskall remaining on the side of the living, and now Iskall had won. Had Doc’s death broken the curse of the Greyskins?

He finally thought to check his communicator, but the chat was going so fast, he couldn’t keep up. Most people were talking about clear heads and the implications of the end of the curse. A couple of hermits briefly wondered at a second death that had apparently happened at around the same time as Doc’s. He saw a few mentions of the word “grey”, of course, but the messages flew by too fast for context. It occurred to him, too, that he no longer felt the constant twinges of malfunctioning redstone. Whether by respawn or by event’s end, that had been fixed too. The curse really had been lifted.

Well, mostly.

\-----

Doc was about to leave Area 77 when he heard the woosh of rockets. Someone came to a fast landing in front of him. “Doc! Brother! Oh, my goodness, dude!”

Doc’s eye widened. “Ren? ...Or Grimdog?”

Ren's skin was still a pale grey, and he still wore his shadowy cloak, though he had pulled the hood back so it no longer shaded his face. He grinned and clapped Doc on the shoulder. “Not so grim anymore, man! And you - you’re not even grey! How’d you manage that, brother?”

Doc smiled at his friend and gently pulled away from Ren’s cold grip, suddenly a little self-conscious of his mossy green skin. “I don’t know, man. I guess because I was the last person who needed to Demise? I’m just as surprised to see you’re still grey.”

Ren’s smile turned rueful. “Yeah, judging by the chat, most of us are still technically, well,  _ dead. _ I saw X saying he’d try to look into it further, but he might still be working on basically no admin power, so I don’t really know what’s going to happen. But hey! Our brains are all back to normal now, after going all screwy from whatever was controlling the whole thing.”

Doc raised his eyebrow and smirked. “Well, as normal as you ever are, eh?”

Ren laughed, taking the dig in stride. “You know it, man! But oh boy, something really did happen to me during all that, didn’t it? Geez,  **Grimdog-”** He clapped his hands to his mouth. The two stared at each other with wide eyes for a moment. Finally, Ren cleared his throat. “Yeah. That guy. I don’t think anyone else got hit that hard with a personality shift like I did.”

"You still have the voice," Doc observed. "But none of the..."

"Thirst for murder?" Ren finished. "Strange affinity for contracts? Nope, dude, that all whisked away pretty much the moment you Demised and ended the game."

Doc surprised Ren by pulling him into a quick hug. “Well, I’m glad you’re back, man. Even if you aren’t your colorful, living self again yet. You all are some of the most creative people I’ve ever known - if Xisuma doesn’t figure out how to change you back, I’m sure everyone will still find a way.”

\-----

“Thank you so much for your help, Iskall,” Zedaph sighed. “I honestly can’t believe that worked.”

“Me neither,” Iskall laughed. “I can’t wait until I have to try and tell Stress about this! She is not going to believe it. When you were trying to explain, it all sounded so... random.”

“See, I felt the same way,” Zedaph chuckled, “but I went with it anyway because that's often how my best ideas happen. And at least we had the help of someone who knew a little bit of what they were doing.”

“Speaking of which,” Iskall realized, “is that Vex still in your head?”

“No, thankfully,” Zedaph said. “Even though we did kinda change the deal a bit once we met up with you, they still honored their promise to leave me alone once they got Cub and Scar back, for which I am very glad.”

Iskall waved at Mumbo as they crossed paths. “It’s weird how everything feels normal again all of a sudden, even though almost everyone is still grey.”

“Yeah,” Zedaph agreed. “And you’d think something like that would make people lose memory of it afterward or something, but no one did, except Tango of course.”

“That’s probably good, though,” Iskall pointed out. “If everyone forgot, we’d sound like crazy people, right? And all the grey hermits would freak out all over again about the color thing. It’d be a mess!”

Zedaph laughed. “Yeah, I guess you’re right. A bit of normalcy is good. And hey, you can finally get that dragon head off of you!”

  
“I don’t know, dude,” Iskall decided. “I’ve kind of grown fond of this thing, you know? It helped break the curse of Demise, after all. Maybe some of the dead hermits will need it to come back to life, too. Besides - it  _ is _ pretty funny.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> December 24 - Doc shut down, and became the final victim of Demise.

**Author's Note:**

> If this fic seems like it's being released on a weird schedule... check the dates :) Every chapter will be posted on (or near, in the case of overlap) the one-year anniversary of that hermit's Demise.


End file.
